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Essays on Ethics and Culture

Essays on Ethics
and Culture
Sabina Lovibond
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

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Contents
Introduction 1
1. Wittgenstein and Moral Realism: The Debate Continues 18
2. Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, and the ‘Apocalyptic View’ 36
3. ‘The Sickness of a Time’: Social Pathology and
Therapeutic Philosophy 54
4. Second Nature, Habitus, and the Ethical: Remarks on
Wittgenstein and Bourdieu 67
5. Practical Reason and Character-Formation 82
6. Between Tradition and Criticism: The ‘Uncodifiability’ of
the Normative 97
7. The Unquiet Life: Salience and Moral Responsibility 116
8. The Varieties of Attention 136
9. The Elusiveness of the Ethical: From Murdoch to Diamond 152
10. Post-Existentialist Moments: Murdoch and Highsmith 170
11. Iris Murdoch and the Quality of Consciousness 184
12. Vulnerable and Invulnerable: Two Faces of Dialectical
Reasoning 200
13. Judith Butler on Political Agency 208
14. Philosophy, Literature, Politics: The Cases of Rorty and
Collingwood 221
Bibliography 241
Acknowledgements 251
Index 253
Introduction
The contents of this collection are for the most part more recent than those of
my Essays on Ethics and Feminism (2015). So far as they involve commentary
on specific philosophers, the main points of reference are (the later)
Wittgenstein and Iris Murdoch.
That juxtaposition may at first sight appear rather unlikely: although
Murdoch once described herself as a ‘Wittgensteinian neo-Platonist’,¹ her
attitude to the author of Philosophical Investigations was destined to evolve
with the passage of time into something more suspicious or even hostile.
However, since I have no ambition to weave the ideas of these two thinkers
into any kind of unified system, I do not undertake to mediate between them.
What the collection has to offer in this respect is simply a continuation of two
largely independent lines of work which have occupied me since the turn of
the century.
Largely, but of course not entirely independent. The essays are drawn
together in a more abstract way by a common interest in the lived experience
of the socially situated individual, alert in some degree to the fact of his or her
situated condition and perhaps to the possibilities offered by its discursive or
artistic representation, but not necessarily enthusiastic about the current
assortment of scripts on offer. The take their cue, or cues, from the kind of
philosophy that practises an informal humanistic reflection on such experi-
ence,² using a method broadly describable as phenomenological. The phe-
nomena in question are those arising from our involvement in the ‘moral life’,
though this term has to be stretched so as to cover the life of value-perception
on one hand and that of practical reason, including political deliberation, on
the other. That involvement, as recorded or interrogated here, shows a variety
of faces to the world—more or less sceptical, more or less anxious, accessible in
¹ In a 1978 interview: see Gillian Dooley (ed.), From A Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction:
Conversations with Iris Murdoch (2003), 92.
² I am indebted here to Cora Diamond, who has defended the claims of a method she associates
particularly with Murdoch and which she describes as ‘reflective empiricism’—the point being that
engagement with the empirical sciences is not the only way to ‘take the empirical seriously in
philosophy’ (‘Murdoch off the Map’: talk delivered at Oxford, November 2014).
Essays on Ethics and Culture. Sabina Lovibond, Oxford University Press. © Sabina Lovibond 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192856166.003.0001
2 
varying degrees to this or that incoming demand for a change of intellectual

direction. But the common factor, I think, is a truth-orientated (so, not purely
literary) study of our dealings with value—where ‘our’ remains indeterminate
in historical scope (so, it may or may not be predominantly a question of the
‘human condition’ in contrast to the specific social condition of people alive
here and now). And this truth-orientated study is one that consents to work
from a position internal to the subject-matter on which it reflects, making do
with just the conceptual and linguistic resources available (for example—as
here) to ordinary, variously opinionated participants in moral, political, or
aesthetic conversation.
A supportive, and as such non-sceptical, engagement in that conversation is
most clearly represented within this collection by the philosophy of Iris
Murdoch. Which is not to deny the important presence of a critical strand
in Murdoch’s work, especially in its earlier phase in the 1950s and 60s: in fact,
the revitalized moral realist position that defines her place in the history of
the subject was arrived at precisely through a highly original account of
what she considered to be the shortcomings of mid-twentieth century moral
philosophy, or rather of the ‘existentialist-behaviourist-utilitarian’ consensus
around which it was organized. But our best reason for seeking to emancipate
ourselves from this consensus, in Murdoch’s view, is that it tends to under-
mine the salutary (pre-theoretical) belief in a domain of values, and of
obligations, not created by but transcending human choice. The defence of
this genuinely naïve realism, and the attempt to rehabilitate its essential
content in a non-naïve, yet lucid form—to ‘do justice to both Socrates and
the virtuous peasant’—may be regarded as Murdoch’s enduring project, and as
a characteristically ‘Platonist’ feature of her thought.
Meanwhile (and subsequently), the possibility of combining a lucid moral
realism with the later philosophy of Wittgenstein has remained in dispute.
There has been more than one kind of ground for scepticism about this
undertaking. Some of the sceptics have been swayed by systematic anti-realist
considerations—purportedly in the spirit of Wittgenstein—about the arbi-
trariness of human linguistic conventions with respect to the natural, or
material, setting of our life as a species; this gives rise to various ‘expressivist’,
‘projectivist’, or ‘communitarian’ positions, topic-neutral in themselves, but
with consequences for the treatment of evaluative thought-contents alongside
others. The adoption of such positions represents, as it were, a refusal to
succumb to the condition of mere internality to the ‘language-game’, mere
participation in existing discursive activities; it expresses a wish for greater
sophistication in the guise of (what John McDowell has called) the ‘sideways-on
 3
view’ of those activities.³ As we’ll see, this genre of refusal—being metaphys-

ically motivated—is to be distinguished from the more ordinary desire not to
be too hopelessly naïve in one’s attitude to the various social relationships in
which one finds oneself caught up, notably those implicit in the maintenance
of linguistic and cognitive norms.⁴ The present collection admittedly tends to
hang back from the dust and heat of ethical norm-enforcement, this tendency
being (I suppose) a normal mark of Socratic doubt—or as we are more likely
to name it nowadays, critical social awareness. But though I cannot find a
place in my own philosophical lexicon for Murdoch’s ‘virtuous peasant’, I do
presume in all my reasoning that the right place to stand as an observer of the
scene of value—critical or conservative, for this purpose it makes no
difference—is not sideways-on to the language-game, but within it, looking
out at the world.
This anti-theoretical strain—or perhaps better, this willingness to function
without apology as a user of evaluative language—may be understood as the
fundamental point of difference between Hans-Johann Glock and myself in
Essay 1, where I respond to some criticism by Glock of my Realism and
Imagination in Ethics (1983). Glock’s wide-ranging discussion is by no
means confined to the views of Lovibond, but he does regard that book
(along with certain writings of McDowell) as representative of what he calls
the ‘anti-anti-realist’, or AAR, approach to Wittgenstein. (That term is itself
taken from McDowell, though I am not sure how long a shelf-life it was really
intended to have.) Glock’s review of the ‘insights and errors’ he finds in AAR
prompts me to reconsider this early specimen of my own work and to reflect
(in hindsight) on its philosophical motivation—especially with regard to the
‘fact–value distinction’ inherited from the British empiricist tradition, and to
the ‘seamless or homogenous’ conception of language proposed in the book.
This is a conception which can restore some unfamiliar cognitive weight to
the language of value, and hence to ethics; but it does impose on me the task of
explaining where I stand in relation to the undeniable pluralism of
Wittgenstein’s later method (his insistence on the ‘countless kinds’ of words
and sentences with which we operate), and finding something to say to Glock’s
objection that I ride roughshod over the difference of ‘role or function’ that
exists between indicative statements in (say) natural science on one hand, and
³ John McDowell, Mind and World (1994), 34–6.

⁴ These two types of norm might strike us as quite distinct in principle—but recall Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (1967), §242: ‘If language is to be a means of
communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in
judgments.’
4 
morals on the other. Whatever the ultimate outcome of this discussion, Essay 1
maintains that the point about ‘role or function’ can legitimately call into play
the idea of intellectual authority relations, which figure in Lovibond (1983) as a
pervasive, yet highly variegated feature of assertoric language-games: a feature
that is to be connected both with the general character of Wittgenstein’s
thoughts on normativity, and with his determination to ‘teach us differences’
or to affirm the value of ‘looking’.⁵ My reply to Glock lays stress on an aspect
of the plurality of linguistic practice on which I am perhaps more inclined
to dwell than he is—namely the radically different implications, depending
on what sort of activity is in question, of the attempt to make us ‘go on in the
same way’.
Wittgenstein the cultural critic is described by Glock as a ‘loose cannon’,
and I would not dissent from that view. He does however have the virtues of
his defects, and no one could accuse the relevant part of his output of a bland,
normcore atmosphere. This is especially true of the Culture and Value anthol-
ogy, in which the confessional and intimate tone characteristic of
Wittgenstein’s later style is applied, here and there, to matters of topical
concern which he takes to engage with his aesthetic and conceptual enquiries.
Essay 2 reflects on some of these passages: it gives a central place to
Wittgenstein’s response to the potentially ‘apocalyptic’ aftermath of World
War II, starting with the (by no means inconceivable) further use of atomic
weapons in the fairly near future. But in tracing his attempt to rise to the
imaginative demands of that sombre historical moment, the essay also seeks to
add something to our understanding of Wittgenstein’s reception of Tolstoy.
Just as the author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has taken to heart the idea
that a solution to the problem of life will consist in the ‘vanishing of the
problem’, so the waspish critic of liberal-humanist resistance to the post-war
(nuclear) arms race is continuing, I suggest, to channel Tolstoy’s hostility to
the progressive and rationalist values of nineteenth-century Europe.
Something in Wittgenstein reacts to the current evidence of existential danger
to civilization with the thought: let it go, it’s not worth saving; and in any case,
‘who knows the laws according to which society develops?’ People can do no
more than follow their natural bent in the direction of militancy or of stoical
acceptance, as the case may be. Yet Wittgenstein seems eventually to take
ownership of this reaction—this perception of the fragility and inscrutability
of social order—and to incorporate it, with a rigour way beyond the reach of
⁵ Ibid., §66: ‘[D]on’t think, but look!’

 5
Tolstoy, into what we might call the ‘deconstructed rationalism’ of his later
philosophy: above all, into the rule-following considerations.
Wittgenstein’s sense of the degraded or diminished state of Western culture
also provides a starting point for Essay 3, which considers in what way his later
philosophy can be understood as ‘naturalistic’. Clearly our business here will
not be with the famous ‘naturalistic fallacy’, the attempt to derive ‘evaluative’
conclusions from ‘factual’ premises—an undertaking to which Wittgenstein
both early and late is a complete stranger. Rather, it will have to do with
language-use as ‘part of our natural history’ and with meaningful, rule-
governed activity as the expression of a socially constructed ‘second nature’
(our ‘first nature’ being determined by membership of a particular animal
species, one that happens to engage in the relevant kind of construction).
However, my main concern in this essay is with the question of whether
Wittgenstein’s later thought can be said to qualify as naturalistic in a further
sense: that is, can we attribute to him the idea of a ‘natural’ (normal, healthy,
sound) condition of human beings with regard to the language they use, and in
contrast to this, a troubled or dubious condition? I realize that there may at
first glance appear to be precious little point in trying to study Wittgenstein
through the lens of Aristotle, of whom, apparently, he claimed not to have read
a word. But this need not deter us from raising the question of what he might
have assimilated indirectly, during his second period at Cambridge, from that
modern manifestation of Aristotelian naturalism represented by Marxist eco-
nomics. And while questions of ‘influence’ may be doomed to remain specu-
lative, we do at least have some textual basis—in Wittgenstein’s recourse to
ideas of ‘sickness’ and ‘therapy’—for thinking of him as in some sense a
contributor to the tradition of twentieth-century social criticism. (Though
I acknowledge that since the ‘bewitchment of our intelligence by means of
language’—and hence the form of therapy appropriate to it—does not take on
any historically specific character in his writings, the status of Wittgenstein’s
putative contribution remains unresolved.)
Essays 4 and 5 develop aspects of the idea of a culturally embedded moral
intelligence, and consider the exposure of this idea to various critical, sceptical,
or reductive tendencies; they both take as a point of departure the ‘naturalism
of second nature’ on which my Ethical Formation⁶ relies, but examine some of
the reasons why we might regard the outcome of that formation as problem-
atic. My aim in these discussions is to connect (what I have represented as) the
⁶ Sabina Lovibond, Ethical Formation (2002). The term ‘naturalism of second nature’ is from
McDowell, Mind and World, 91.
6 
later-Wittgensteinian conception of normativity with some input from more

recent European thinkers—Bourdieu, Gadamer, Derrida.
In the case of Pierre Bourdieu, the point at issue is what to make of his claim
to have identified a form of ‘practical belief ’ which is ‘not a “state of mind”, . . .
but rather a state of the body’. Although we seem to be concerned here with
the same phenomena that lead Wittgenstein to speak of obeying a rule
‘blindly’, it is not obligatory to infer from our experience of acting without
hesitation—as language-users, or as participants in any familiar social
practice—that such action must be governed by a special, ‘bodily’ or ‘practical’,
kind of normativity located ‘below’ the level of discourse at which one can be
said to employ such and such a concept, or to make a correct or incorrect
judgement. And it is not obligatory, either, to read Wittgenstein as drawing
this inference. In the case of Bourdieu, on the other hand, there seems to be
plenty of textual evidence that he does indeed draw it. But my suggestion in
Essay 4 is that this fiercely ‘anti-scholastic’ side of his thought is less compel-
ling than his effort to understand empirically how certain (bad) features accrue
to our historically specific ‘second nature’, and thus to show how we might
intervene in the relevant formative processes. Fortunately, this latter part of
Bourdieu’s work—his contribution to the ‘longue-durée project of
Enlightenment’—seems to me to be detachable from his implicitly reductionist
psychological theory.
However, the ‘naturalism of second nature’—construed as a basis for moral
realism, or for the ‘practical reason view of ethics’, to switch to a perhaps more
accommodating form of words—faces difficulties not only of a reductionist
but of a sceptical kind. I am not thinking here of any global epistemological
scepticism, or even of neo-Humean moral philosophy in particular, but of
doubt about the credibility of the ideal by which our rationalist tradition takes
character-formation in general to be regulated. Essay 5 focuses on certain
theoretical anti-humanist considerations represented by Derrida’s critique of
J. L. Austin as the unwitting host of a questionable ‘philosophy of conscious-
ness’: it reviews the stand-off, previously discussed in chapter 5 of Ethical
Formation, between this line of criticism and the conception of autonomy
(that is, of fully responsible action or utterance) which it takes as its target.
Scepticism with regard to the Platonic-Aristotelian ‘centred’ personality, or
character, stems from a perception of the formative process as essentially
incomplete. I mean a perception of it not merely as the admittedly difficult
pursuit of ‘practical wisdom’, but as something blocked or opposed in prin-
ciple by the structural anonymity of language: the fact that any resources
available to me for the expression of my individual states of mind will be
 7
available, in the first instance, precisely because they are public property—
though capable also of being ‘grafted’ into an indefinite variety of new con-
texts. Applied specifically to ethical formation, this implies the existence of a
permanent element of alterity even within what we would most like to think of
as the ‘true’ (rational) self—the locus of our values and convictions.
Yet in this context too, I argue, there is scope for a ‘deconstructed ration-
alism’. We can respond to the sceptical impact of post-structuralism—to the
thought that our rational subjectivity is only that of place-holders within a
structure—by recalling that a background of not-yet-integrated ‘otherness’ is
allowed for quite calmly in the Platonic-Aristotelian model, for example in the
well-known view of Aristotle that we become virtuous by practising the virtues
(that is: you can practise them without yet ‘really having’ them); and that if the
presence of this background can rightly be understood as a concession to
negativity or pessimism about our relation to the ethical, that concession has
been internal to the rationalist programme all along, despite the edifying
imagery and rhetoric of the latter. As Gadamer reminds us, the ‘rational
self ’ of idealist philosophy may be an abstraction—something isolated for
intellectual purposes from the apeiron, or formless totality, of experience—but
it is no more of an abstraction than the ‘appetitive self ’ which moral sceptics
are apt to credit with superior ontological standing.
Essay 6 addresses the worry that so far from picturing our ethical ‘second
nature’ as hopelessly weak and vague (by reason of the structural anonymity
just mentioned), the ‘practical reason’ view threatens to box it into a rigid
traditionalism that will be incompatible with the democratic values of respect
for principle and for (explicit) law. Conservative thought has undoubtedly
found something to its advantage in the idea that mutual understanding—and
therefore, any successful dialogue—relies on a background of ‘like-
mindedness’ which goes beyond what we can put into words. This idea
has at times been exploited, or weaponized, to repress the demand for
rational justification of power-structures that can really be ‘justified’ only
by their immense familiarity. However, I argue that the ‘quietism’ of the
later Wittgenstein—his declaration that philosophy ‘leaves everything as it
is’—should not be confused with the wish to keep everything as it is politically,
or (if this is different) with regard to the ‘physiognomy’ of existing language-
games. A philosophy that seeks to limit itself to the description of linguistic
practice can hardly undertake to warn us against practices of critical
reflection in which, as conscientious thinkers and agents, we are already
unavoidably engaged. Hence, regardless of any first-order views attributable
to Wittgenstein personally, his Philosophical Investigations should not be
8 
understood as a source of dialectical support for ‘traditionalism’ or ‘primitiv-

ism’ as substantive ethical positions.
Wittgenstein does in effect follow the lead of Plato and Aristotle in basing
our capacity for sound judgement, such as it is, on the early acquisition of a
scheme of good habits—one answering to whatever ‘space of reasons’ we will
eventually be called on to negotiate. But what emerges from that early process
of formation is indeed a capacity for judgement: the very thing with which the
classical theorists of practical reason wanted to endow at any rate their
favoured specimens of rational humanity, the ones destined to give orders to
the rest. Autonomy, or ‘knowing (without guidance) how to go on’, figures
here as an educational achievement; modern (post-Enlightenment) philoso-
phy has seized on the idea that this achievement can be democratized. As Kant
puts it: ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’ My suggestion is that
whatever genuine lessons we can learn from Wittgenstein about the nature of
normativity and rule-governed practices, they will not per se be at variance
with this maxim.
The collection now moves on to questions of moral epistemology, thus
drawing a little closer to the phenomenology of actually trying to do the right
thing. Essay 7, written in response to an invitation to reflect on the idea of
‘salience’, begins by considering the role assigned to that idea in a certain
variety of neo-Aristotelian ethics, where our ‘perception of saliences’ is under-
stood as a somewhat personal matter—but also, in some respects anyway, as
open to criticism for outright cognitive inadequacy. That is: we may (on this
view) be more or less well attuned to the morally salient facts of a given
situation—for example, that someone needs help, or is being unjustly treated.
So much is implicit in the kind of moral realism issuing from a ‘naturalism
of second nature’. However, my concern in Essay 7 is more specifically with
the extent of the demands placed on our ‘perception of saliences’ once we
acknowledge this as a domain in which moral effort, success, and failure are at
stake. Taking a hint from Robert M. Adams, I explore the suggestion that what
we need to worry about ethically—what we can be blamed or reproached for—
is not limited to our voluntary acts (and omissions), but takes in all those
attitudes or states of mind which reflect on us ethically even if we did not
choose to have them: ingratitude, disrespect, callous indifference, and the like.
But now, if responsibility is not to be tied to the voluntary, what criterion can
be used to fix the limits of that which ‘reflects on us’? The answer is that we
ought to connect responsibility with the ‘possibility of ethical appreciation’, or
with the availability of ‘data that are rich enough’ to permit such appreciation.
 9
I raise no objection to the philosophy expressed in this picture, since I find

much to admire in Adams’s view of ethics as having to do not just with right
and wrong action but with what we are for or against ‘in our hearts’. I think it
is by no means easy, though, to determine what could qualify as a good-
enough appreciation of the array of ethical ‘data’ presented to contemporary,
data-saturated hearts and minds; nor, therefore, to explain what it would be
like to get a satisfying grip on the morally salient features of the world in which
we—meaning we, in particular—have to act. (At least, not when that world
expands beyond the range of immediate, domestic, or strictly local claims.) But
none of this is to deny the merit, or indeed the fundamental correctness, of an
‘ethics of the heart’. It is to point to what is sobering in the implications of that
view—but also to offer a reminder that the ‘surprise attack on conscience’ is a
familiar element in democratic dialogue: we have plenty of experience, after
all, of the negotiation of competing claims on our ethical attention.
The theme of attention links this discussion to the philosophy of Iris
Murdoch, with which the next four pieces are concerned. Essay 8 opens with
some consideration of what Murdoch wishes to learn from Simone Weil,
whose writings inspire her claim that we need a ‘new vocabulary of atten-
tion’—a claim that can be read both in terms of her resistance to the ‘thin’, or
abstract, character of much contemporary ethical theory, and also in relation
to her practice as a novelist, which is inevitably open to scrutiny in the light of
her stated views on literary value.
On the face of it, the lesson Murdoch draws from Weil is of an ascetic
nature, having to do with the suppression of personality (‘the part of us which
belongs to error and sin’) and with respect—or better, love—for what is other
than oneself. In order to escape the self and to achieve contact with reality, we
need to apply our full attention to a given object of thought or contemplation:
such attention, ‘taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer’; and
because it is free from desire, it ‘infallibly contains a reward’. These ideas relate
to intellectual and aesthetic experience, but their main interest for Murdoch
lies in their bearing on our perception of other people as centres of conscious-
ness: ‘Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than
oneself is real.’
However, Murdoch the creative artist also finds herself drawn to an account
of this ‘love’ which celebrates expansiveness and tolerance—the ‘negative
capability’ of writers such as Shakespeare and Tolstoy, who seem able to
disappear behind the characters they invent—and which is therefore obliged
to come to some sort of accommodation with the moral ambiguity and
untidiness of the human scene. This liberal, or affirmative, side to
10 
Murdoch’s artistic ideal is not altogether easy to combine with the Platonist
content of her moral philosophy, and that difficulty sets the agenda for The
Fire and the Sun,⁷ in which she (as it were) invites Plato to moderate his
hostility to ‘mimetic’ art in Republic X: to recognize that despite the varied and
often questionable motivation of our interest in fiction and drama, good art at
any rate can be truth-orientated; that it can bring about a pact between reason
and pleasure.
Essay 8 credits Murdoch’s updated Platonist aesthetic with the achievement
of an impressive balancing act or synthesis. (All the more so once we notice the
part played in that synthesis by her clever deployment of the Kantian ‘sub-
lime’, not included in my brief outline above.) But it remarks on the way the
exercise of attention or attentiveness seems to undergo fragmentation as
Murdoch’s creative project evolves—sometimes staying close to the Weilian
demand for submission to the ‘otherness’ of the world (‘animals, birds, stones
and trees’), but often straying into territory more favourable to the ‘bad side of
human nature’ with its ‘gleeful envious malice’. Those last phrases are taken
from Murdoch’s critical—yet also sympathetic—exposition of Plato’s artistic
‘puritanism’. To the extent that her attitude is sympathetic, it naturally tends
to privilege the activity of selflessly disciplined observation over that of beady-
eyed, ‘malicious’ tale-telling. And my suggestion here—drawing on what I take
to be some relevant evidence from the novels—is that the full-strength Weilian
ideal is liable to make its presence felt precisely as an item of doctrine, a
concession of ‘pleasure’ to ‘reason’, rather than as an integral part of the
emerging hedonistic offer. (I realize of course that despite the many happy
hours I have spent with it, I had better not put myself forward as an instance of
the ‘ideal reader’ Murdoch imagines for her fiction.)
I said at the outset that for my own purposes, I do not seek to extract any
unified moral philosophy from the thought of Iris Murdoch and that of
Wittgenstein. One writer who might be said not only to draw inspiration
from both these sources, but in a way to synthesize them, is Cora Diamond.
But for Diamond a major part of the importance of Wittgenstein lies in the
idea that the ethical is not ‘in the world’,⁸ and hence is not—or does not have—
a distinct subject-matter: it is everywhere and nowhere, a matter of ‘percep-
tiveness in regard to the currents of life’ or to the ‘irreducibly particular’
quality of living things. Although Murdoch does not share this ontological
⁷ Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (1977).
⁸ See Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (1961),
6.41–7.
 11
debt to the Tractatus, Diamond applauds her conception of the moral life as
going on ‘continually’ and as something ‘connected with the whole of our
being’, not ‘intermittent or specialised’: in this respect, Murdoch can be called
upon as an ally against the crude (though no doubt educationally convenient)
picture of morality as ‘a branch of thought, one branch among others’.
(Diamond, incidentally, regards Lovibond (1983)—discussed in Essay 1—as
committed to this crude picture by virtue of its reliance on the idea of ‘moral
discourse’.)
Essay 9 explores the ‘morality everywhere’ view, including Murdoch’s
conviction that we can quite rightly turn to the novel (at least in its familiar,
humanist form) to show us ‘the ubiquity of the moral quality inherent in
consciousness’. A difficulty with the ‘everywhere’ view seems to me to arise
from the manifest plurality of value—that is, from the ordinary-language
evidence that we do indeed take moral value to be one kind among others,
and hence that even if our alertness to value pervades every aspect of cogni-
tion, this will not put us in a position to dispense entirely with the ‘depart-
mental’ conception. In fact, while the novel as a literary form often speaks to
our curiosity about unusual ‘moral’ attitudes (in the non-departmental, or
global, sense envisaged by Murdoch and Diamond), we also appreciate the
spectacle of (departmental) morality taking its chances within the overall
scheme of human motivation, triumphantly or otherwise, as the case may
be. The wisdom we draw from this spectacle may feed into a Murdochian
striving for the ‘purification of consciousness’, but it may equally well be
diverted into the project of becoming—in the words of Henry James—a
person ‘on whom nothing is lost’. So the main purpose of the essay is to
warn against attaching an inappropriate moralism to the idea—in itself intri-
guing and persuasive—of the ubiquity of value in our thinking. All the more so
since ‘moralism’ is a hazard about which Diamond herself sometimes worries;
but then, as I suggest in conclusion, the convergence of her agenda for moral
philosophy with that of Murdoch is in any case more accidental—less system-
driven—than it may appear at first sight.
A novelist who is in no danger of succumbing to moralism is the crime
writer Patricia Highsmith, that eerie specialist in the portrayal of frigid
psychopathy. Yet Highsmith and Murdoch are linked for a moment around
1950 by a shared alertness to existentialist ideas, and by the part they both
played—however differently from one another—as mediators of those ideas to
the English-speaking world. This unexpectedly revealing juxtaposition is the
subject of Essay 10, which was prompted by events in 2019 to mark the
centenary of Murdoch’s birth. Drawing on her discussion of Sartre’s early
12 
novel Nausea, this essay suggests a contrast between the ‘cool Platonism’
which she will soon be elaborating under the influence of Weil, and an
alternative ‘angry’ Platonism which seems to afflict men like Sartre’s
Roquentin—or like Charles Bruno in Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train—
who recoil in disgust from the gross contingency of the embodied condition.
Although it will be left to others to offer a diagnosis of this latter state of mind
in terms of sexual politics, Murdoch’s commentary takes some interesting first
steps towards an ethical critique of existentialist machismo.
Essay 11 returns to Murdoch on the variable quality of individual con-
sciousness and to the question of how that consciousness may be open to
improvement. I set the scene here with some general remarks on the historic
role of philosophy as an aid to the ‘struggle against stupidity’, a stupidity which
resolves itself for Murdoch into the more or less familiar array of moral
failings revealed by (self-)critical reflection. But the main point is to bring
out what looks like a thematic continuity between Murdoch’s idealistic, or
Weilian, programme of purification, and—in the early formative background
of both thinkers—the Marxist ambition to improve consciousness by raising it:
that is, by alerting us to the objective reality of a system of social relations
about which the dominant class needs to keep us mystified.
By the time of the philosophical work for which she is remembered,
Murdoch is no longer a Marxist, and her eventual attitude to that strain of
politics and critical theory is one of fierce rejection. Still, the question of what it
takes to change one’s consciousness for the better remains for some years
vividly present to her. In particular, the contrasting claims on normative
ethical theory of articulate understanding and of simple goodness—the wish
to ‘do justice to both Socrates and the virtuous peasant’—continues to exercise
her as philosopher and novelist alike. A striking example is to be found in
A Fairly Honourable Defeat⁹ with its seemingly ironic reversal of moral
outcomes, the self-styled ‘intellectuals’ proving irredeemably lightweight,
while the saintly qualities of the shambolic Tallis Browne—who though an
academic of sorts, displays no intellectual pretensions whatsoever—are grad-
ually brought to light. Tallis may be a socialist, or indeed a Marxist, by
conviction but he is evidently not endowed with the skill of ‘cognitive map-
ping’ in the historical-materialist manner: the ability to grasp one’s position in
a social totality, with a view to acting on that totality and changing it. And we
are perhaps intended to feel that this gap or void in Tallis’s mental endowment
actually contributes something to his human merit: it identifies him as a
⁹ Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970).

 13
modern avatar of that ‘virtuous peasant’ from whom the chattering classes
have so much to learn.
However, the present collection is not done with activism or with its
possible bearing on the discipline of philosophy. Essay 12 originated in a
commemorative conference for another Oxford philosopher, Pamela Sue
Anderson (1955–2017): it takes its cue from Anderson’s interest in the facts
of mutual vulnerability and ‘precarious life’, whether inside or outside the
seminar room. I begin here by noting that the classic ‘dialectical’ encounter, in
the sense bequeathed to us by Plato’s Socratic dialogues, does indeed involve a
moment of aporia or being-at-a-loss—but it owes its dynamism, its progres-
sive ambition, to the desire to get beyond aporia and into the possession of
some stable truth. I then proceed to ask why, nevertheless, writers like
Anderson (or like Judith Butler, who is one of her influences) should still
find so much potential in the theme of intellectual precarity. This is by no
means a rhetorical question, since it points us towards the business of insti-
tutional critique, and to the uneven level of hospitality which (academic)
philosophy extends to different social groups. There is the experience of
vulnerability appropriate to philosophical enquiry a priori—but there is also
the contingent, all-too-familiar extra layer imposed by ‘stupid’ expectations as
to how a philosopher ought in general to look, sound, and so forth: in fact, the
kind of cognitive obstacle touched on in Essay 4 in relation to Bourdieu.
(Anderson herself might of course feel that these brisk remarks about ‘obs-
tacles’ and ‘stupidity’ do less than justice to what we can learn from our own
aporetic moments.)
We remain in activist territory with the work of Judith Butler, the subject of
Essay 13. This essay returns to the post-modernist ‘critique of reason’ on
which I was writing in the 1990s¹⁰ and takes a more detailed look at Butler’s
contribution to that line of thought. In view of the framing of my earlier
discussions, I ought to emphasize that what she has to offer cannot be
classified simply as a variety of feminism: it belongs to the more inclusive
enterprise of ‘queer theory’, viewing subjectivity quite generally as a social
artefact, something ‘produced in and as a gendered matrix of relations’. On
this basis Butler develops a subtle form of scepticism about those liberal-
humanist notions of autonomy, both intellectual and practical, which we
inherit from the Enlightenment. She follows Nietzsche (in The Genealogy of
Morals) in rejecting the idea of a ‘doer behind the deed’. But she does not
¹⁰ See Essays on Ethics and Feminism, especially Essays 1–4. (Essay 4, ‘Meaning What We Say:
Feminist Ethics and the Critique of Humanism’, is partly about Butler.)
14 
actually want to eliminate subjectivity, since any such move would render
political agency unintelligible: the aim, rather, is to rethink it.
My own aim in this essay, drawing mainly on the introduction to Bodies
That Matter,¹¹ is to clarify what Butler thinks is wrong with the familiar kind
of feminism that opposes ‘sex’ (the biological datum) to ‘gender’ (the cultural
construct). Although she denies that her view is a form of linguistic idealism,
she maintains that ‘sex’ as well as ‘gender’ is within the cultural sphere. So she
can hold out the hopeful prospect of an active ‘disidentification with those
regulatory norms by which sexual difference is materialized’. She wishes to
occupy a position which ‘cannot be conflated with voluntarism or
individualism . . . and in no way presupposes a choosing subject’,¹² yet which
still respects the goals traditionally associated with a humane, democratic
politics.
Concerning this picture, I raise the question: is there room for a subject that
is ‘in no way’ a choosing subject? Butler is right to remind us that, as socially
constructed beings, we do not precede (and do not choose to assume) our
social or intellectual identity, considered in the abstract or as a totality. But this
does not entail that there is no such thing as the ‘choice’ of action in a more
modest and partial—if you like, a post-metaphysical—sense. (Here I am
appealing, in effect, to the possibilities opened up by a ‘deconstructed ration-
alism’ of the kind already mentioned in connection with the later
Wittgenstein.) Accordingly, my suggestion is that Butler exaggerates the
ideological difference between herself and those feminists who have followed
Simone de Beauvoir in deploying a sex/gender distinction.
But perhaps even a deconstructed rationalism is now surplus to require-
ments? That would be the view of Richard Rorty, whose work challenges the
grip exerted on philosophy by ‘epistemological’ values—truth, objectivity,
accurate representation, and the like—and celebrates the achievement of
‘abnormal’ thinkers such as Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Rorty would like to
see epistemology dislodged from its privileged position in favour of a more
purely conversational style of thought, free of the responsibilities attaching to
philosophy as a supposedly progressive, truth-seeking discipline. Essay 14
reflects on this campaign and considers its implications for political
engagement.
In order to bring out something of the specificity of Rorty’s views,
I compare them with those of an earlier twentieth-century philosopher,
R. G. Collingwood. So far as I know, Collingwood is not a person of interest
¹¹ Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993). ¹² Ibid., 15.
 15
to Rorty, and this is understandable in the light of his unswerving commit-

ment to the teleological and system-building habit of thought which Rorty
hopes to set aside. Yet the two do have certain points in common, notably an
irreverent negativity towards mainstream philosophy and a desire to under-
stand historically how the discipline has come to look the way it does in their
own time. They both acknowledge the status of philosophy as a ‘branch of
literature’, a field in which individual expressive qualities are revealed. And
despite the gulf that separates them in terms of political experience, they share
an identity—at least nominally and in principle—as ‘liberals’.
It is natural to hesitate over the switch to a form of philosophy from which
epistemic ‘orientation’ has been removed. Only we must realize that Rorty is
not proposing to do away with all standards of correct judgement: far from it,
since he thinks ‘normal’ discourses such as that of natural science depend on
the recognition of common norms of assertibility. What he deplores is the
attempt to ground these norms in some more than merely local authority—to
break out into an ‘archê beyond discourse’, this being the fault with which he
would no doubt charge Kant’s original manifesto for ‘orientation in
thinking’.¹³
Collingwood’s writings seem to me to provide a striking lesson on the
practical, or civic, value of ‘orientation’. Particularly interesting from this
point of view is his 1939 Autobiography, which builds towards a diagnosis of
the fascist phenomenon as symptomatic of ‘the end of clear thinking and the
triumph of irrationalism’, and hence as constituting an existential emergency
for European culture and for philosophy as such. He ends his book on a note
of militancy (‘Henceforth I shall fight in the daylight’), though as it turns out
he has only a few more years to live.
Here as in Essay 2, an ‘apocalyptic’ atmosphere is present which is perhaps
not so foreign to our own historical moment. Rorty, by comparison, is a bit
disappointing as a theorist of the impending existential crisis of our species,
since he holds that identification with ‘humanity as such’—as distinct from the
various smaller or more local groups to which one may belong—is psycho-
logically impossible. (It looks as though he thinks one can get as far as
identifying with the ‘West’, but no further.) There is an element of arbitrari-
ness here which is probably consistent with his self-consciously subversive
wish to ‘prevent conversation from degenerating into inquiry’. But in the end,
I suggest, we may wonder if Rorty’s pessimism about the project of solidarity
¹³ Kant, ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’, in Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings (1991).
16 
with the human is itself to be understood as an effect of the ‘bad faith’ which he
claims to find at work in rationalist philosophy.¹⁴
It should be clear by now that I have no very technical designs on the word
‘culture’ that figures in my title. Few readers, I imagine, are likely to connect
this with Matthew Arnold’s edifying notion of the ‘great aim of culture’ as that
of ‘setting ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail’,
under the auspices of ‘art, science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of
religion’.¹⁵ Probably more familiar nowadays is the descriptive, quasi-
anthropological usage that gives us such concepts as ‘material culture’, ‘popu-
lar culture’, ‘rape culture’—and of course the ubiquitous ‘culture wars’, even if
these seem to consist mainly in the reactionary bullying of people who speak
up in various ways for social justice. However, I assume that the term ‘culture’
can still sometimes denote intellectual and artistic activity in particular, and
that to use it in this way is not automatically to sign up to a defensive—or
embattled—contrast between ‘minority culture’ and the more primitive men-
tal life of the ‘masses’. As Stefan Collini has put it, ‘Writing, painting, com-
posing, and so on are legitimate, if somewhat rarefied, human activities . . . they
are activities that may, from time to time, help prompt the kind of reflections
on [other, more practical or instrumental] aspects of reality that immersion in
those aspects themselves does not so readily tend to foster.’¹⁶
‘And in conclusion . . .’ Well, what exactly? First and foremost anyway,
I consider myself very fortunate to have been presented with the varied writing
and lecturing opportunities that have ensured several of the liveliest years
I could have wished for in retirement. I realize that Murdoch and even, to
some extent, Wittgenstein are niche interests within professional philosophy,
but these have proved immensely rewarding niches or micro-environments in
which to work. In conjunction with other topics to which I have been invited
to apply myself, they have encouraged me to think new thoughts without
seeming to impose the (ever more unfeasible) obligation to keep abreast of
‘current developments in ethics’. If there are any current developments that
¹⁴ It may be pointed out that ‘solidarity with the human’ falls well short of a commitment to defend
the natural world as a whole. This is an important line of criticism, but my discussion of Rorty did not
seem to be the place to pursue it.
¹⁵ Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (1938; first published 1869), 11.
The same idealistic conception forms the basis of T. S. Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture
(1948), which ventures to ‘assert with some confidence that our period is one of decline; that the
standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are
visible in every department of human activity’. Eliot goes on, though, to argue that ‘culture is the one
thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious
activities, each pursued for its own sake’ (19).
¹⁶ ‘Defending Cultural Criticism’, in New Left Review (New Series) 18 (2002), 91; see also his
‘Culture Talk’, in New Left Review (New Series) 7 (2001), esp. 47.
 17
positively demand our attention, I tend to look for them (as in Essay 7) outside
rather than inside the study, and hence to locate them within that genre of
‘worldly philosophy’ which I invoked in the introduction to Essays on Ethics
and Feminism.
The present collection too owes much to the involvement of lecture and
seminar audiences, and to the careful work of editors, for which I am very
grateful. This kind of gratitude inevitably remains rather vague and abstract,
but just occasionally I have credited a particular point to some named reader
or commentator, or added some recent afterthought indicated by an asterisk
and the words ‘2022 note’. However, no substantive changes have been made
to work already in print; in a few cases where there is some thematic overlap
between the introductory paragraphs of different essays, I hope this can be
tolerated as a matter of orientation or stage-setting for those approaching
particular pieces individually.
Essays 2 and 6 received helpful critical discussion at the philosophers’ work-
in-progress group at Worcester College, Oxford, convened by Steven
Methven. Thanks are also due, once again, to Peter Momtchiloff of Oxford
University Press for his generous interest in this project; and as always, to
Stephen Williams for unfailing philosophical insight and entertainment.
Throughout this book, emphasis in quotations is in the original unless
otherwise stated. In the Introduction, where references are not given for the
brief quotations included, details are to be found within the relevant essay and
in the Bibliography.
Essay 1
Wittgenstein and Moral Realism:
The Debate Continues
1 Introduction: Recalling the 1980s
Can there really be such a position, in ethics or any other branch of philoso-
phy, as ‘anti-anti-realism’? The term would not spontaneously have suggested
itself to me, but I cannot avoid taking some responsibility for the view it
denotes, since Hans-Johann Glock has named me—along with John
McDowell—as one of its patrons.¹
McDowell suggests this form of words rather lightly and deprecatingly in
the introduction to his Mind, Value, and Reality (1998). Some of the essays in
that collection, he says, can be taken to defend a version of ‘moral realism’. But
they do so by inviting us to revisit a conception of the ethical that is rationalist
or objectivist ‘in an unambitious sense involving no more than the idea of
getting things right’. Hence McDowell regards the ‘moral realist’ label as
potentially misleading: it risks obscuring the fact that his stance is ‘more
negative than positive’, something ‘better described as “anti-anti-realism”
than as “realism”’; he seeks to show simply that ‘anti-realist positions such
as emotivism and its sophisticated descendants . . . are responses to a miscon-
ception of the significance of the obvious fact that ethical, and more generally
evaluative, thinking is not science’.² This, then, is the source—whether or not
McDowell ever seriously envisaged his double-negative mouthful being admit-
ted to more general discussion—of the language used in Glock’s title and
projected back into the 1970s and 80s, when ‘Oxford philosophers like
McDowell and Lovibond invoked Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language
against the still prevailing non-cognitivist/anti-realist mainstream’ in ethical
theory.
¹ Hans-Johann Glock, ‘Wittgensteinian Anti-Anti-Realism: One “Anti” Too Many?’, first published
in Ethical Perspectives 22 (2015) and reprinted in Richard Amesbury and Hartmut von Sass (eds.),
Ethics after Wittgenstein: Contemplation and Critique (2021) (hereafter ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’). Glock
uses the abbreviation ‘AAR’ for ‘anti-anti-realism’.
² John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (1998), viii.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192856166.003.0002
    19
It must be acknowledged that Lovibond—that is, the Lovibond of Realism

and Imagination in Ethics,³ to which Glock refers—is not so circumspect. The
position I develop in that book is described without compunction as ‘a form of
moral realism derived from the later philosophy of Wittgenstein’– though I do
go on in the same paragraph to say that I will try to construct ‘an idealized
version of this position as I understand it, so that my discussion will have as its
object a philosophical theory rather than a specific philosopher or group of
philosophers’.⁴ In fact, rereading the book with Glock’s criticism in mind,
I could see that circumspection is not its salient point. It is a ‘young person’s
book’, fired off into the public domain as if there were no tomorrow and
nothing to plan for, and probably containing numerous errors of taste and
judgement.
But my business here is not to apologize or recant, because I don’t feel that
the underlying lessons drawn from my philosophical education up to (let’s
say) 1980 positively require to be unlearned. Much has since been added,
many difficulties negotiated, but not in the manner of someone tearing up
their opening pages and starting again. The ‘anti-non-cognitivism’ which
Glock⁵ finds in Lovibond’s Realism has continued to prove its worth as an
intellectual compass, and the later Wittgenstein has continued to inform my
thinking—not exactly qua moral mentor or cultural critic (a role in which, as
Glock aptly observes, the man was a ‘loose cannon’⁶), but rather as an inward
defence against certain kinds of mystification.
To begin, then, with a snapshot composed from a distance of thirty-odd years,
but not yet accountable to Glock’s recent commentary: the book is indeed
designed to offer a somewhat systematic response to ethical non-cognitivism.
By this I mean the view that moral (and other) value-judgements—in so far as
they really are evaluative rather than descriptive—lack cognitive sense, or in
other words, seek to express (not knowledge, but) a variety of positive or
negative attitudes. The response is meant to work not just on a theoretical
but also on an existential level: it addresses difficulties about the ‘meaning of
life’ which had already been identified as a weakness in non-cognitivist
approaches, with their implicitly infantilizing tendency to reduce the ethical
subject to a locus of quasi-consumerist preferences—the bearer, so to speak,
of a wishlist in regard to the state of the world. Although some of
the insights of non-cognitivism emerge unscathed from critical inspection
(see §5), the book aims to dislodge any dogmatic or a priori conviction that
³ Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (1983) (hereafter ‘Realism’).

⁴ Ibid., 25 (emphasis added). ⁵ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 113. ⁶ Ibid., 100.
20    
evaluative discourse lies beyond the legitimate reach of the effort to get
things right. In pursuing that aim, it draws extensively on ideas from
Wittgenstein about the grounding of human powers of judgement in the
life of a community. But also—and with an eye to the ideological pressures
or temptations to which academic moral philosophy appeared susceptible at
the time of writing—it devotes some close scrutiny to an emerging authori-
tarian application of ‘moral realist’ views, and to the critique of an illiberal
or sentimental ‘communitarianism’. To that extent it is a politically motiv-
ated book; though of course it is nonetheless an attempt to achieve clarity
about some strictly philosophical questions, in what I saw (and still see) as
the therapeutic spirit of Wittgenstein’s later work.
2 Questions of Method
The verdict of Glock—stated programmatically at the end of his

introduction—is that ‘while AAR fails both exegetically and philosophically,
its insights and errors provide crucial lessons for any attempt to use
Wittgenstein’s ideas in striking the delicate balance between realism and
anti-realism concerning ethics’.⁷ My concern here will naturally be with the
supposed errors. However, I remain more interested in philosophical than in
exegetical correctness: not because accuracy of exposition is a value to which
we can afford to show any disrespect, but because the attempt to learn from
another writer for one’s own heuristic purposes—to make fresh use of ideas
‘derived from’ theirs—is always likely to involve a certain eclecticism, and
possibly a certain one-sidedness.⁸
Glock also says that AAR, which he sees as a contribution to ‘neo-
intuitionist’ moral philosophy, ‘stands out from many other realist positions
⁷ Ibid., 101.
⁸ These words may seem to identify me as one of Richard Rorty’s ‘pragmatic Wittgensteinians’, who
do not set out to recapture what is ‘merely idiosyncratic in . . . Wittgenstein’s own way of thinking, but
rather to restate his best arguments in more effective ways’: see his ‘Wittgenstein and the Linguistic
Turn’, in Arif Ahmed (ed.), Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: A Critical Guide (2010), 134.
My approach could perhaps be described, in this sense, as pragmatic (as distinct from ‘pragmatist’—i.e.,
affiliated to a pragmatist theory of the kind favoured by Rorty—but overall I find myself more in tune
with the effort of Paul Horwich (‘Rorty’s Wittgenstein’, in the same collection) to show that a
therapeutic reading of Philosophical Investigations has greater merit than Rorty allows, and to com-
mend the resulting metaphysical attitude as correct in itself. And to the extent that contemporary
Wittgenstein studies comprise a ‘rationalist’ and an ‘irrationalist’ tendency, as suggested in another
discussion by Glock, I would have to align myself predominantly with the former; see his ‘Perspectives
on Wittgenstein: An Intermittently Opinionated Survey’, in Guy Kahane, Edward Kanterian, and
OskariKuusela (eds.), Wittgenstein and his Interpreters: Essays in Memory of Gordon Baker (2007),
esp. §IV.
    21
inspired by Wittgenstein in that it appeals to Wittgenstein’s claims on par-

ticular topics—notably truth—rather than his method’.⁹ This is a character-
ization which I might or might not accept in relation to Realism, depending on
how we understand ‘method’. While the book is not devoid of examples or
thought-experiments drawn from actual linguistic practice, it is certainly not a
specimen of detailed conceptual enquiry mediated by what we might be
inclined to say about this or that problematic situation, or how we might
teach or communicate particular moral ideas. Nor does it address itself (as
Cora Diamond subsequently pointed out) to that important dimension of
moral expression which exceeds or bypasses the verbal, relying instead on
material that ‘speaks for itself ’: the restrained but powerful narrative, the dry
observation.¹⁰ Having sprouted from the soil of Davidsonian truth-conditional
semantics, my discussion is indeed rather fixated on moral discourse and on
the truth-aptitude of moral propositions or judgements. On the other hand, it
is (I would claim) attentive to the methodological principle that informs
everything else in Philosophical Investigations (hereafter ‘PI’) and in ‘later
Wittgenstein’ generally: that of the integration of language with activity,
practice, technique, institutions, ‘forms of life’. It takes seriously the question
what, if anything, we can do with (for example) the kind of sentences that
purport to make contact with a strongly recognition-transcendent moral
reality—that is, with ‘a world containing moral circumstances which tran-
scend the awareness, not just of individuals, but of the entire linguistic
community’.¹¹ It states explicitly that this is no longer a matter of the formal
possibilities offered by a certain vocabulary and syntax, but of whether the
resulting sentences have a use: whether we know ‘what it would be like’ for
everyone to be wrong about a moral issue. This problem takes up a good deal
of space in the later sections of the book, and connects with the presence of the
word ‘imagination’ in its title.
⁹ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 112.

¹⁰ For this criticism of the treatment of ethics in Realism, see Cora Diamond, ‘Wittgenstein,
Mathematics, and Ethics: Resisting the Attractions of Realism’, in Hans Sluga and David Stern (eds.),
The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (1996). My book is by no means neglectful of the wordless
side of life since it builds upon the more general insight that all communication, linguistic or otherwise,
presupposes a sublinguistic consensus attributable to our ‘insertion into the natural world’: see esp. §48,
211–12. However, I respond directly (and somewhat concessively) to Diamond in my Ethical
Formation (2002), ch. 2, §§3–4. And for some more recent reflections on her view that there is no
such thing as the subject-matter of ethics—this being the thought with which I still find myself at
variance—see Essay 9 in the present volume. *2022 note: A more fully documented critical discussion
of the ‘no subject-matter’ view is to be found in Benjamin De Mesel, The Later Wittgenstein and Moral
Philosophy (2018), ch. 4.
¹¹ Realism, 77.
22    
‘Meaning is a physiognomy’, says Wittgenstein, epigrammatically.¹² This

thought exerts a strong influence on Lovibond (1983), with respect both to
linguistic meaning and, later, to the question of the ‘meaning of life’ which
frames the entire discussion. But again, should it be read as a ‘claim on a
particular topic’, or rather as a general-purpose methodological principle or
‘reminder’? Bearing in mind the systematic nature of Wittgenstein’s deter-
mination to confine himself to the visible surfaces of expressive phenomena—
not in the reductive sense of maintaining that behaviour is ‘all there is’, but by
refusing to back away from strictly conceptual subject-matter into psycho-
logical or physiological speculation (since ‘there must not be anything
hypothetical . . .’¹³)—I would place this feature too under the heading of
Wittgensteinian method. The book’s ‘neo-intuitionist’ moves are not merely
opportunistic, but seek to show how ethics can benefit from an open-minded,
phenomenological approach to debates about what sorts of thing can be ‘seen’.
For example, we can challenge the ‘physiological prejudices’ that might lead us
to find fault with perfectly ordinary idioms such as ‘I saw the way you looked
at him.’ There is nothing wrong with this; though as Wittgenstein goes on to
observe, there is no heavy-duty philosophy in it either; for ‘our naïve, normal
way of expressing ourselves . . . does not show you a theory but only a concept
of seeing’.¹⁴ In the same way—despite a few artless uses of the word ‘theory’ to
describe its own proceedings—the book’s main concern in regard to meta-
ethics is to free evaluative discourse from the prejudice it has suffered in the
British empiricist tradition, and to promote appreciation of the ‘physiognomy’
of such discourse. It is true that my account of ethical intuitionism, a view
finding some fresh support at that time in writers like McDowell and Mark
Platts, is designed to show how that view can defend itself against the familiar
objection that ‘moral perception’, ‘moral blindness’, and so forth are mere
bluster with no proper epistemological basis. But the defence proceeds—
initially at least—by way of an appeal not to disregard the license contained
in our naïve language to talk, for instance, about ‘seeing moral aspects of a
situation’. So the proposed ‘modest form of intuitionism’, while admittedly
helping itself for purposes of orientation to a bit of philosophical jargon, still
seems to me to be faithful in spirit to the later Wittgensteinian method—that
method being applied here to the retrieval, and possible restoration to esteem,
of some underrated elements in our actual concept (or conception) of ‘seeing’.
¹² Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E.M. Anscombe (1967), §568.

¹³ Ibid., §109.
¹⁴ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (1981), §223; cf. Realism, 48–9. For the
idea of the meaning of life as a ‘physiognomy’, see §50 of the book.
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3 The Idea of Truth-Aptitude
Let’s now add some more detail to Glock’s critique of AAR. He lists six claims
which he takes to be definitive of this position, but I will focus on claim (1)
since he describes this as ‘the central tenet, around which the others revolve’.
It says that ‘ethical judgements or statements can be true or false’, or in
other words that such statements, ‘at least those in the indicative mood, are
truth-apt’.¹⁵ This claim rests, as Glock goes on to explain, on a ‘deflationary’
view of truth in general—a view that renounces any substantive account of
truth in terms of the relation between ‘truth-bearers’ and ‘truth-makers’ (say,
propositions and states of affairs), and accepts instead that the essence of the
matter is captured by Tarski-style truisms of the form ‘“p” is true iff p’. And
with regard to Wittgenstein, Glock agrees that ‘[t]hroughout his career, [his
general perspective on truth] had a deflationary touch’.¹⁶ So to that extent
Glock is in listening mode. He takes issue, however, with the ‘homogeneous or
“seamless” conception of language’ attributed to (the later) Wittgenstein in
Realism, §6: with the suggestion that ‘[i]f something has the grammatical form
of a proposition, then it is a proposition’; and that ‘the only way in which an
indicative statement can fail to describe reality is by not being true’—a move in
support of which I cite Wittgenstein on the temptation to find fault, by some
supposedly philosophical criterion, with ordinary (and viable) forms of
expression. (‘As if, for example, the proposition “he has pains” could be false
in some other way than by that man’s not having pains.’)¹⁷
These remarks—the ones just cited from my 1983 text—certainly look like
sweeping generalizations. Even here, Glock finds some common ground, since
he thinks the idea of ‘seamlessness’ correctly captures Wittgenstein’s view that
our language-game, or rather the sum total of our various language-games, is
‘not answerable to a purported essence of reality’:¹⁸ this picture of language as
‘autonomous’, and of grammar as ‘arbitrary’, is topic-neutral and thus no
more threatening to evaluative talk than to any other kind. But Glock thinks
I go wrong in the consequences I draw from the Wittgensteinian approach.
For although ‘there is no metaphysical perspective from which one form
of discourse could be disqualified as less realistic than another’, it ‘does not
follow . . . that scientific and moral statements have the same role or function to
begin with . . . it does not even follow that all statements that we call true or
¹⁵ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 113; see in particular PI §136. ¹⁶ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 114.

¹⁷ Realism, 25–6; cf. PI §402. ¹⁸ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 120.
24    
false have the same role or function’.¹⁹ These words contain a message for
Lovibond, who (as Glock puts it) ‘denies that there is such a divergence in
function [for example, the functions of description and expression] between
different kinds of truth-apt propositions’,²⁰ since all of them may be said to
refer to an objective reality.
4 Intellectual Authority-Relations
My book does lay stress, at least in its opening phase, on metaphysical

considerations—or rather, on what it offers as therapeutically anti-metaphys-
ical considerations—as distinct from the functional study of language-games.
This is because, as noted earlier, the initial purpose of the discussion is to
confront—and to resolve or ‘deconstruct’—the dogmatic fact-value opposition
inherited from non-cognitivist ethics. However, the pluralist (or as Glock puts
it, ‘anti-formalist’²¹) aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought is not forgotten even at
this stage: thus §9 spells out the point that
[t]he homogeneity of language is not [being] asserted at the phenomenal

level (the level at which we ‘describe language-games’, cf. PI §486), for there
are manifestly countless different kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols’,
‘words’, ‘sentences’(PI §23). It is asserted at the metaphysical level—the level
at which empiricism drives a wedge between factual and evaluative
meaning.²²
I say that the pluralist aspect is not forgotten; and the varying functions that
indicative sentences can perform in different regions of discourse are not
forgotten either. The book takes up this point in a selective fashion governed
by its own concerns: at any rate it soon discovers what Glock calls the
‘semantic (“grammatical”) perspective from which one form of discourse
can be described as less descriptive than another’,²³ and as he himself observes,
is quite candid about the uneven prospects of securing consensus among
competent participants in a conversation, depending on subject-matter.
Glock notes that McDowell has less to say than I do about such variation.
¹⁹ Ibid., 121. ²⁰ Ibid., 119 (emphasis added).

²¹ Ibid., 117: ‘[T]he later Wittgenstein insists on just such differences [that is: ‘ “grammatical”
differences between moral assertions or judgements on the one hand, factual assertions or judgements
on the other”], as part of what one might call his anti-formalism.’
²² Realism, 36. ²³ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 121.
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But his supporting reference to me is to some fairly preliminary thoughts on

this subject, which in fact permeates the book in its entirety from about §10
onwards, moral consensus and its absence being among my central themes.
Above all, someone approaching me through Glock would be unlikely to guess
that my discussion attempts—however amateurishly—to connect the insights
of non-foundational epistemology in the analytical tradition, developed partly
(though not exclusively) in a Wittgensteinian idiom, with those of critical
theory. Particularly important here is the idea of ‘intellectual authority-
relations’ introduced in §16.²⁴ Wittgenstein’s treatment of rule-following has
probably commanded more attention than anything else in PI; yet its material
aspect (or so I suggest) has not been fully appreciated. Just as Quine will speak
a few years later about a ‘pull toward objectivity’ which induces us to match
our linguistic responses correctly to sensory stimulation, so Wittgenstein
brings to his account of the teacher–pupil relationship a characteristic phys-
icality: ‘I let him go his way, or hold him back.’²⁵
Allusions of this kind to the phenomenon of social control, and to the speed
with which we fall back (so to speak) on sheer muscle in any actual rule-
following crisis, may sound reductive. There is, to be sure, nothing cosy about
Wittgenstein’s picture of the learning experience (‘Stop interrupting me and
do as I tell you. So far your doubts don’t make sense at all.’²⁶) And in reporting
on this picture in its application to ethics, Glock sometimes speaks in what
might be taken for a reductionist voice: thus, ‘[a]n ethical proposition is true
[he says on behalf of Wittgenstein] in so far as it accurately expresses the
stance of the speaker’s community and prescribes a course of action condoned
by that stance’.²⁷ But any such impression is dispelled when he goes on to warn
that although Wittgenstein connects truth with consensus, he does not equate
these things: a faithful reading will be one that steers a course between
the ‘Scylla of anti-realist reductionism’ (since the bearers of truth-values are
nothing other than actual or possible contents of thought), and the ‘Charybdis
of a realist disregard for the role of human thought and practice’.²⁸ So here again
Glock and I find ourselves in harmony, though my own number one piece of
textual evidence suggests a slightly different way of putting the point.
‘Wittgenstein writes at RFM VI §23: “Not empiricism and yet realism in
philosophy, that is the hardest thing”.’²⁹ Despite the obscurity or instability
²⁴ Realism, 63 and context. ²⁵ PI §208.

²⁶ Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (1969), §310 (hereafter ‘OC’).
²⁷ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 123. ²⁸ Ibid., 126.
²⁹ Realism, 45. The reference is to Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans.
G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd edn (1978) (hereafter ‘RFM’).
26    
of the idea of ‘realism’, I take it that the difficulty envisaged in this sentence is
precisely the one mentioned by Glock—namely, that of holding on to the
critical concepts by which our thought-contents are to be assessed (and thus
refusing to disown the innocently realist attitude implicit in all truth-
orientated thought), while at the same time declining to be drawn into the
bad kind of ‘realism’ which seeks to ground what we say and think in
something external to the space of concepts (Glock’s ‘Charybdis’, aligned in
my quoted text with the ‘empiricist’ appeal to sense-data). In any event, Glock
and I agree that in order to find a way between Scylla and Charybdis, one
needs to do justice both to the (human) ‘language-game’ as a natural phe-
nomenon, and to the claims of (at least some of) our talk to reach all the way
out to its ostensible subject-matter. (‘When we say, and mean, that such-and-
such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the
fact, but we mean: this—is—so’: PI §95.)
5 Degrees of Factuality
It’s important, at this point, to notice once again how misleading it could be to
attribute to my book the thesis that all truth-apt propositions have ‘the same
role or function’.³⁰ Taking the ‘function’ of any given linguistic practice not in
a purely formal sense, but—as Glock would presumably wish—in terms of its
place in the nexus of social activity, I can readily agree (on behalf of Realism)
that not all assertoric discourse involves de facto realist aspirations. That is:
not all language-games in which we proceed by making assertions—by utter-
ing sentences in the indicative mood—are equally beholden to an ideal of
intersubjective agreement, or equally committed to treating disagreement as a
symptom of error in some quarter. At one extreme in this respect would be the
technique of counting, in which we are trained ‘with endless practice, with
merciless exactitude’;³¹ at the other would be the kind of conversation that
does not even seriously aim at the reconciliation of conflicting judgements. For
example, ‘if you tell me . . . that it is great fun to ride on the big dipper [roller-
coaster], and I then undertake to prove to you that you are mistaken and that
in fact it is not really fun at all, you will be right to infer that (for whatever
reason) I have failed to make myself at home with the concept of “fun”’.³² The
use of ‘fun’ and suchlike words is premised to some extent on our interest in
³⁰ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 119 (quoted in §3). ³¹ Wittgenstein, RFM I §4.

³² Realism, 66.
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the variety of individual perspectives and responses: it approaches these with

curiosity rather than with dismay. So while my discussion seeks to undermine
the ‘fact-value distinction’ qua metaphysical dogma, it is certainly not meant
to substitute a new dogma to the effect that there is nothing worth saying, at
the phenomenal level, about the way language-games differ from one another
in ‘factuality’. I made an effort to tread carefully here because I was anxious to
show that the position developed in my book could sustain a certain liberal-
pluralist atmosphere which is one of the attractions of non-cognitivist ethics,
and which goes missing, in particular, in the moral realism of Platts (in Ways
of Meaning).³³ If that is the atmosphere we favour, we will do well to
acknowledge—and to make our peace with—the variable role of intellectual
authority within different ‘games’.
6 Recognition-Transcendent Moral Truth?
However, when it comes to the description or ‘perspicuous representation’ of

linguistic practice, all parties have an equal duty to avoid tendentiousness. And
anyone not prejudiced in advance against the claims of an ‘unambitious’
realism—against the idea of an implicit commitment to correctness in our
thinking (cf. §1)—can legitimately point out that we do not in general feel
bound to set that commitment aside, or to regard it as discredited, wherever
we come up against the limited power of discursive argument. Of course, one
can easily be discouraged by the perceived moral stupidity of others. But there
is no sound reason to presume that in the case of every question that admits of
a correct (or good enough) answer, the correctness of that answer will be
obvious without more ado. In fact, McDowell has argued in a more recent
discussion that Plato’s Forms are to be understood as an antidote to just this
mistake. The Forms, he says, ‘are an image to enable us to sustain the idea that
there is such a thing as getting things right, precisely in the absence of ways to
make answers to ethical questions universally compelling’.³⁴ Plato’s dialogues
set before us certain characters who are able—contingently, by virtue (for
example) of not having their heads stuffed with sociobiological nonsense—to
find their way to such answers, even if they are unable to take their opponents
with them. We may be reminded here of Wittgenstein’s remark about
³³ See Mark Platts, Ways of Meaning: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Language, 2nd edn (1997),
ch. 10.
³⁴ John McDowell, ‘Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity’ (first published 2000), in his The Engaged
Intellect: Philosophical Essays (2009), 210.
28    
knowing how to judge the genuineness, or otherwise, of expressions of feeling:

‘Can one learn this knowledge? Yes; some can.’³⁵ Only some. But what those
people have is nevertheless knowledge.
As noted earlier (§2), my book does not shy away from the question
whether a ‘Wittgensteinian realism’ (or as Glock would put it, AAR) can
accommodate recognition-transcendent moral truth—that is, whether it can
make sense of the possibility that moral truth might spin free of any existing
doxa or consensus. In envisaging this possibility, we are evidently distancing
ourselves from the commitment of the historical Wittgenstein to a ‘non-
cognitivist and loosely speaking existentialist morality’ (though not necessarily
from his personal ‘predilection for dogmatic-cum-authoritarian ideologies’:
Glock’s words in both cases; he wisely holds back from trying to square this
circle).³⁶ I think I can claim to have remained faithful, in my treatment of the
problem of recognition-transcendence, to my declared intention of working at
the level of what ‘lies open to view’—namely, the ‘physiognomy’ of the moral
language-game as revealed to a descriptive method; but it takes me more than
one encounter with that problem to unpack all of what I want to say about it.
My first attempt, in §19, revolves around ‘what it is like for a community to
change its mind about a moral issue’,³⁷ and concedes that there is no coun-
terpart (or no precise counterpart) in ethics to the experience of acquiring
decisive new evidence—for example, the kind of observational evidence which
can lead to a more or less uniform and immediate change in the view taken by
competent judges about a natural-scientific question. So this discussion con-
tinues to dwell on the rough-and-ready state of intellectual authority in ethics,
by comparison with the sciences:³⁸ it concludes by granting that with regard to
the totality of speakers (as distinct from the inevitably flawed individual),
‘moral facts have a non-metaphysical way of failing to be . . . recognition-
transcendent, just as . . . moral judgements have a non-metaphysical way of
failing (sometimes) to be objective’.³⁹ We may or may not be enthusiastic
about diversity of values for its own sake, but it may in any case be impossible
to achieve that underlying condition of like-mindedness that would enable us
to approach moral thinking, as we do arithmetic, with the feeling that ‘the
steps are really already taken, even before I take them’ in any given context.⁴⁰
³⁵ Wittgenstein, PI Pt II, 227. ³⁶ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 106, 100. ³⁷ Realism, 79.

³⁸ Cf. ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 124: ‘The kind of consensus one can achieve in scientific discourse,
however fallible, far outstrips the kind of consensus we appear capable of attaining concerning matters
moral.’
³⁹ Realism, 81. ⁴⁰ Cf. Wittgenstein, PI §188 (emphasis added on ‘I’).
    29
Now, to repeat, this is a first attempt—though despite the diligent cross-

referencing practised throughout the book, I don’t actually seem to call
attention to the moment when I embark, much later at §35, on a second one
with a rather different outcome. The later discussion switches to a more purely
phenomenological, or ‘surface-grammar’, approach for which it is essential to
recognize the contrast between truth and social acceptability as an internal
feature of the language-game. As Glock notes, while Wittgenstein connects
truth with consensus, ‘this is not by way of a consensus or pragmatist theory of
truth. Without consensus in the application of predicates, we would (could)
not employ them, but this is not part of their meaning. Whether (it is true that)
an object satisfies a predicate does not depend on human consensus.’⁴¹ This
point is central to my second, more assertive treatment of recognition-
transcendent moral truth, which takes comfort from the ‘absence [in ethics
as elsewhere] of any logical (or “grammatical”) objection to statements of the
form: “I’m right and everyone else is wrong”’⁴²—the legitimacy of which, as
I go on to say, ‘belongs with’ the use of critical or normative concepts such as
truth, goodness, reality and rationality.
7 The Power to Imagine Alternatives
‘In ethics as elsewhere’—really? This may seem to invite the suspicion that we
have after all lost interest in whether it is possible to ‘do anything’ with the
moral realist idiom I am trying to defend. Aren’t we now heading back
towards the dead end represented by old-fashioned ethical intuitionism,
which was said to rely on bluster to distract attention from its epistemological
poverty (cf. §2)? I must answer: hopefully no, because the book is by this time
well launched upon the application of its interim findings to the topic of
confrontation between forms of life—not just in the synchronic mode reflected
in discussions of cultural relativism,⁴³ but also in a diachronic mode exempli-
fied specifically by historical difference and change. In order to deal with these
latter phenomena in a non-reductive fashion—to keep faith, as Glock and
I both wish to do, with the principle that ‘truth is not a matter of consensus’—
it is necessary to develop a more dialectical account of our practices of truth-
orientated, or world-directed, thinking. Our aim must be to acknowledge the
⁴¹ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 124–5. ⁴² Realism, 148. ⁴³ Ibid., §32.

30    
material grounding of those practices in consensus, but to avoid lapsing into

what McDowell calls the ‘sideways-on’ view;⁴⁴ rather, to show respect for the
inbuilt commitment of our meanings not to ‘stop anywhere short of the fact’
(cf. §4; this of course remains subject to the qualification mentioned in §5
about concepts like ‘fun’).
‘We’re right and the other lot are wrong.’ The license to say this, or at least
to entertain this thought—not merely for propaganda purposes, but as a
putative landmark en route from objectively worse to better thinking—is
located, I suggest, at the heart of the moral realist project. But what my book
eventually posits as the (epistemologically) most precious thing is to know that
one retains that license in a situation of difficulty or defeat. To this end, it
argues—still by the method of ‘assembling reminders’—that just as (for
example) pain-language has evolved towards a measure of autonomy in
relation to the pain-behaviour of which it is a sophisticated outgrowth, so
our normative and critical concepts have attained to a measure of autonomy
vis-à-vis the institutional basis (that is: the means of enforcement) without
which, in a general way, those concepts would not be viable. Thanks to the
resources of self-mastery, the all-pervasive wealth of cool, that comes with
civilization, we can suppose—not easily perhaps, but quite intelligibly—that
someone who is laughing is really in pain; likewise, thanks to our culturally
implanted power to imagine alternatives (different evaluative attitudes, differ-
ent systems of social constraint), we can think—again perhaps not easily, but
intelligibly: ‘People seem not to have a problem with this, but actually, it is
wrong and we ought to change direction.’⁴⁵
This willingness to appeal proleptically to an imagined ‘form of life’ that
would validate our non-consensual, yet at the same time non-arbitrary, judge-
ment is the badge of the moral realist; it expresses faith in the possibility of
‘getting things right . . . in the absence of ways to make [our own views]
compelling’. However, it is first and foremost a practical orientation and
only secondarily (and negatively) a matter of theory—only, that is, in so far
as one refuses to be dislodged by theoretical (metaphysical) considerations
from one’s position ‘inside’ the moral language-game. This, we may recall, was
the point of the ‘homogeneous or seamless’ conception of language which
Glock finds problematic: not to project on to our linguistic behaviour a
misleading image of uniformity, but to suggest (or, to issue a ‘reminder’)
that if we find it possible to occupy the internal perspective on factual or
⁴⁴ John McDowell, Mind and World (1994), e.g. 34–6.

⁴⁵ Realism, 150; cf. Wittgenstein, PI §393.
    31
scientific discourse, there is no properly philosophical reason—at any rate, no

reason innocent of a quasi-empiricist ‘metaphysical favouritism’—why we
should not be able to do this for moral discourse too. Consensus in that area
can certainly be elusive at times, but (to echo Wittgenstein) why allow the
occasional contradiction to wreck the game?⁴⁶ It is not as though nothing of
importance would be lost if we did so.
I continue, therefore, to have my doubts about a reading of (the later)
Wittgenstein that credits him with some kind of substantial, revisionist philo-
sophical position—for example, one that ‘points in the direction of a commu-
nitarian variant of expressivism’⁴⁷—and to find his thought more congenial to
the purpose that governs my book: namely, the removal of certain intellectual
obstacles to our thorough-going acquiescence in the ‘situated’, human cogni-
tive standpoint. Glock and I are agreed that to occupy that standpoint—to
consent actually to play one of our assertoric language-games—is to draw a
distinction between true propositions and (merely) socially acceptable ones.
But for him the sticking-point, the moment when AAR supposedly helps itself
to ‘one “anti” too many’, comes with the idea that to insist on that distinction
is simply to take seriously the possibility of really meaning what we think and
say from within our own conceptual space; of meaning nothing less—even, for
instance, in ethics—than: ‘This—is—so.’ Glock, I take it, will refuse to say with
McDowell that the deflationary view of truth as a ‘predicate of disquotation’ is
adequate in itself to support the AAR picture. (‘If one has a steadfast under-
standing of truth as disquotability’, writes McDowell, ‘one can be immune to
philosophically induced anxiety about how thought and speech, undertaken
from the midst of our local practices, can make contact with reality’.⁴⁸) I think
he (Glock) will be the loser by this refusal, but am unsure how to pursue the
point any further.
8 Values and Secondary Qualities
Instead, as a coda, I will add a few words on the topic which also forms a coda
to Glock’s discussion of AAR—the analogy between values and secondary
qualities (VSQ). This analogy rests on the idea that predicates which reflect or
express human sensibilities can nevertheless denote real features of the objects
⁴⁶ Cf. Realism, 179 and Wittgenstein, RFM VII §11. ⁴⁷ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 123.
⁴⁸ ‘Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity’, 221 (emphasis added).
32    
we talk about—the word ‘sensibilities’ being intended to embrace both phys-

ical sense-perception and ethical (or aesthetic) ‘intuition’.
Glock identifies this as a place where ‘trouble lurks’ for AAR;⁴⁹ but his
diagnosis is unconvincing. He offers a reconstruction of the analogy in terms
of competent judgement: ‘An object having secondary quality Q is [i.e., consists
in] its being such as to appear Q to competent and well-placed observers . . . An
object having moral value V is [i.e., consists in] its being recognized as having
V by competent members of a speech-community.’ And he thinks these claims
do violence to the Wittgensteinian principle that consensus can play only an
indirect role in our understanding of truth and falsehood, since they effectively
‘define their respective analysanda by reference to human reactions’—thus
committing AAR ‘[i]n this respect, at least . . . [to a position] much closer to
Blackburn-style anti-realism or projectivism than its adherents would be
prepared to concede’.⁵⁰ So AAR is supposedly in danger here of forfeiting its
right to that crucial second ‘anti’.
The problem with Glock’s (admittedly rapid and impressionistic) account
of the VSQ analogy is that it fails to acknowledge the normative implications
of the reference to competent observers or judges. In the case of colour-
properties, for example, the competence in question will presumably just
amount to a disposition to call things red (etc.) when they are red. That
disposition will of course depend for its successful establishment on the
(contingent) absence of handicaps such as colour-blindness. But if there is
no difficulty of that kind, what one acquires is competence in describing a
certain kind of (objective) feature of one’s surroundings.⁵¹ This element of
normativity—the thing that enters with the requirement to get it right—is all
the more evident in the case of value-judgement, which calls upon dispositions
to react to objects in the way that is merited by their various good or bad
attributes. We may doubt whether McDowell does himself any favours here by
talking about a disanalogy attendant upon the analogy between values and
secondary qualities:⁵² he would have done better, I think, to posit an imperfect
or qualified analogy, the imperfection lying in the fact that ‘moral blindness’ is
a good deal more prevalent than colour-blindness, and the likelihood of going
⁴⁹ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 125. ⁵⁰ Ibid., 126.

⁵¹ Cf. Wittgenstein, PI §381: ‘How do I know that this colour is red?—It would be an answer to say:
“I have learnt English”.’
⁵² John McDowell, ‘Values and Secondary Qualities’ (first published 1985), in his Mind, Value, and
Reality, 143: ‘The disanalogy . . . is that a virtue (say) is conceived to be not merely such as to elicit the
appropriate “attitude” (as a colour is merely such as to cause the appropriate experiences), but rather
such as to merit it.’ The term ‘metaphysical favouritism’ in §7 is borrowed from this essay (see 148, note
54; 149, note 57).
    33
wrong in one’s judgement correspondingly more acute. (This is what I have

tried to capture by saying that the get-it-right constraint is ‘all the more
evident’ in the evaluative case.) However, my present concern is not to settle
that question, but simply to dissent from the suggestion that AAR is commit-
ted to any reductive definition of value-properties ‘by reference to human
reactions’—or, consequently, to any retreat into anti-realist or ‘projectivist’
territory. Human reactions are of course involved in the deployment of
evaluative vocabulary, just as the human perceptual apparatus is involved in
talk about colours; but the realist (or AAR) character of the analogy comes
out in the idea that our perspective on our own evaluative responses is an
essentially critical one: that is, it contains a permanent potential for critical
reflection. Thus, fear is a response to the (objectively) fearful, or failing that, it
is ‘the intelligibly defective product of a propensity towards responses that
would be intelligible in that way’.⁵³ Admiration, likewise, is a response to the
(objectively) admirable, or failing that, it is an intelligibly defective by-product
of our capacity for admiring what we ought to admire. In representing this
critical function as internal to the powers we invoke when we say that ‘to have
moral value V is to be recognized as having V by competent judges’—that, for
example, ‘the good is what is loved by the good’—we ensure that although such
judgement remains ours (being shaped, in some cases at least, by such obvi-
ously subjective tendencies as love or admiration), it accepts guidance from
the objective presence of the properties that engage its interest. I persist,
therefore, in the belief that AAR can avoid collapsing into any of the revision-
ary metaphysical theories (projectivism, ‘communitarian expressivism’, or
whatever) which one may be tempted to read into the later writings of
Wittgenstein.
9 An Enduring Critical Realism
The foregoing discussion has probably sounded a bit intransigent as a

response to Glock’s thoughtful commentary. That impression would be accur-
ate in that I have resisted his central suggestion about ‘one “anti” too many’—
though I have also tried to put to rest any suspicion that a Wittgensteinian
moral realism of the kind I was advocating is doomed to be in denial about the
actual (empirical) variety of our ‘language-games’, or about the varied styles of
authority relationship involved in them.
⁵³ Ibid., 144 (emphasis added).

34    
Still, the moment of AAR as reconstructed by Glock was some forty years
ago. What, if anything, remains of it that can lay claim to the attention of
present-day philosophy? I would answer in a nutshell that the thing of
enduring interest is the critical attitude demanded by this kind of view towards
the totality of our linguistic practice—irrespective of the degree to which this
or that local discursive phenomenon happens to qualify, by the standards of an
empiricist ‘metaphysical favouritism’, as genuinely ‘descriptive’.
‘It is our acting which lies at the bottom of the language-game’, writes
Wittgenstein (OC§204). To bring this idea to full consciousness is to add a
dimension of complicity to our acquiescence not only in the overtly ‘moral’
side of our ongoing form of life but also in its indebtedness to the discourses of
scientific, technical, and managerial expertise; and with the recognition of
complicity—or so I would optimistically suggest—comes a newly vigilant or
critical relation to the ‘customs, uses, institutions’ that regulate our lives as
thinking beings.⁵⁴ But the critical perspective is not necessarily a sceptical one,
in the sense of disavowing or abandoning the get-it-right constraint. Rather, to
think critically is to seek to correct the faults in one’s present state of under-
standing, whether theoretical or practical. It favours scepticism, not of a
metaphysical or global kind, but of the worldly kind that teaches us to be
careful where we bestow our trust.
The merit I still see in AAR—not that I am particularly keen to perpetuate
this label—is that it offers a strategy for resistance to any specifically ethical
scepticism, any conception of evaluative subject-matter as in principle epi-
stemically second-rate, by bringing such subject-matter within the scope of a
topic-neutral critical realism. The resulting view is set against the background
of a (purportedly) sober acknowledgement of the limitations of discursive
reason—limitations which of course are liable, under modern (or postmodern)
conditions, to look more forbidding in relation to ethics than to ‘factual’ or
scientific discourse. Realism may have been regarded in some quarters as naïve
or out of touch in its deference to ideals of ‘universal reason’; and I did
subsequently have a go at processing some of the postmodernist hostility to
this idea which gained currency in the 1980s and 90s.⁵⁵ However, it’s worth
mentioning that one of the incentives not to sneer at ‘universal reason’ is the
impending ecological crisis, the (contingent, historic) threat to our collective
species-life, which already forms part of the intellectual landscape of my book
⁵⁴ For this notion of complicity see Realism, 119.

⁵⁵ See my Ethical Formation (2002), esp. Part III; and for direct discussion of ‘universal reason’, see
Essays 1 and 2—first published 1989 and 1992, respectively—of my Essays on Ethics and Feminism
(2015), the second of which responds to criticism by Richard Rorty.
    35
and which is all the more inescapable today: this might in fact be regarded as a
more valuable long-term point of reference than the paranoia about discursive
‘totalitarianism’ that informs much late twentieth-century cultural theory.
And I would also continue to give credit to AAR as a position that can
motivate us not to stand by without protest while practical thinking—the
pursuit of the good life, the negotiation of human problems—is expelled or
excused from the domain in which non-instrumental standards of correctness
apply.⁵⁶
⁵⁶ Thanks to Hanjo Glock for providing the stimulus to revisit Realism, and to the organizers of the
2016 Zürich conference, ‘Doing Ethics after Wittgenstein’.
Essay 2
Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, and the
‘Apocalyptic View’
1 Introduction
Wittgenstein was not a social scientist and neither am I.¹ On the other hand,
he does record some fairly uninhibited thoughts about the general condition
of society in so far as it bears on the conceptual and aesthetic questions that
chiefly interest him. These perceptions supply the starting point for the
present discussion, the purpose of which is to enhance our understanding of
Wittgenstein himself rather than to extract any methodological lessons from
his work.
Here is one of his more startling passages of social observation, dating
from 1946:
The hysterical fear over the atom bomb now being experienced, or at any rate
expressed, by the public almost suggests that at last something really salutary
has been invented. The fright at least gives the impression of a really effective
bitter medicine. I can’t help thinking: if this didn’t have something good
about it the philistines wouldn’t be making an outcry. But perhaps this too is
a childish idea. Because really all I can mean is that the bomb offers a
prospect of the end, the destruction, of an evil—our disgusting soapy water
science [Wissenschaft]. And certainly that’s not an unpleasant thought; but
who can say what would come after this destruction? The people now
making speeches against producing the bomb are undoubtedly the scum of
the intellectuals, but even that does not prove beyond question that what
they abominate is to be welcomed. (Wittgenstein 1980, 48–9)²
¹ *2022 note: This essay was originally presented as a talk to the British Wittgenstein Society Annual
Conference on the theme of ‘Wittgenstein and the Social Sciences’ (University of Exeter, 2015).
² The German text has eines grässlichen Übels (a ghastly evil); for some reason the adjective is
omitted in the 1980 English translation, but it is included in the revised (1998) text edited by Alois
Pichler. This text also offers the translation ‘dregs of the intelligentsia’ in place of ‘scum of the
intellectuals’.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192856166.003.0003
, ,   ‘   ’ 37
Returning recently to Culture and Value, I found that these words still
produced something of the same recoil as they did when I first read them in
1981, and without exactly having forgotten them in the interim I could
probably be said to have dismissed or suppressed them as an element in my
overall picture of Wittgenstein. But now I feel impelled to bring them out for
further inspection. If they do somehow form part of the total picture, where do
they fit into it? Of course one can remind oneself that we are looking here at a
private manuscript note and not an intervention in an actual political debate.³
And in the interest of historical perspective one can recall that Bertrand
Russell, for example—despite his dedication in later years to the cause of
nuclear disarmament—was willing at this stage, before the Soviet Union got
the bomb in 1949, to countenance not merely the threatened but the actual use
of it by the USA to secure a stable world-order.⁴ One can accept, in short, that
we should not automatically be scandalized when we encounter evidence that
people found it difficult, at this juncture, to keep their wits about them. But
still—none of this really seems to help us come to terms with Wittgenstein as
the author of our problem text.
2 Tolstoy as an Influence on Wittgenstein
I think it is possible to get some light on the situation by taking a step

backwards, or sideways, or at any rate in what may initially appear an unlikely
direction: that of the ethical remarks at the end of the Tractatus, and specif-
ically their affiliation to the philosophy of Tolstoy. Not ‘philosophy’ in the
academic sense, but in the sense of ‘world-view’ or ‘existential attitude’—the
attitude commended or illustrated at certain points in Tolstoy’s novels, and
also in his religious writings. That Wittgenstein valued Tolstoy as a religious
thinker is well known in general terms; we hear that during his military service
in World War I people called him ‘the one with the Gospel’ (Tolstoy’s Gospel
in Brief, an ethical distillation of the teaching of Jesus, of which Wittgenstein
³ *2022 note: For more on the private character of Culture and Value, see Essay 3 in this volume, esp.
§11 and context.
⁴ See Alan Ryan, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life (1988), ch. 8. Russell’s thinking on this matter,
according to Ryan, was consequentialist; hence in the immediate post-war situation he did not rule out
the possibility that in order to ensure the best prospect of long-term security for humanity at large, one
might be obliged to take action resulting in hundreds of millions of deaths in Europe (see esp. 178–80).
Russell, then, will presumably not be among the ‘scum’ Wittgenstein has in mind. I have not pursued
the question of whom he does have in mind.
38 , ,   ‘   ’
says in a letter: ‘At its time this book virtually kept me alive.’⁵ More arresting,
though, is the suggestion by Anthony Flew⁶ and Caleb Thompson⁷ of a
moment of conspicuous fidelity to Tolstoy in the following passage:
6.52 We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been
answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course
there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.
6.521 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the
problem.
(Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of
doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have been unable to say
what constituted that sense?)⁸
Thompson differs from Flew on certain points of interpretative detail, but

what he affirms as a correct insight—and what matters for our purposes—is
that the Tractatus notion of the ‘vanishing of the problem’ is prefigured by
Tolstoy’s account in his memoir, A Confession,⁹ of the process by which the
‘problem’ vanished for him: that is, of his eventual success in fending off
questions of the form ‘why bother’, ‘why not kill oneself immediately’, and
so on., not through the intellectual discovery of answers to these questions but
through emergence into a frame of mind in which the questions no longer
arise. Although knowledge once acquired cannot be voluntarily set aside, this
will no longer trouble us when we reflect that the proposition ‘all is vanity’ has
been current since ancient times, and yet human beings have taken such
thoughts in their stride and got on with the business of living, and found
meaning in it too; at least, they have not been brought up short by the feeling
of meaninglessness that afflicts Tolstoy at his moment of crisis. It is the
dawning realization that this general ability to go on is not a symptom of
stupidity, but instead something that casts an unfavourable light on his own
mental contortions, that marks the turning-point in Tolstoy’s self-criticism.¹⁰
⁵ Quoted in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1991), 132. ‘The one with the
Gospel’: Hermine Wittgenstein, ‘My Brother Ludwig’, in Rush Rhees, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein
(1981), 3.
⁶ ‘Tolstoi and the Meaning of Life’, Ethics 73 (1963), 110–18.
⁷ ‘Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Meaning of Life’, Philosophical Investigations 20 (1997), 97–116.
⁸ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness
(1961).
⁹ Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, trans. Jane Kentish (2008).
¹⁰ See in particular A Confession, 50, 66.
, ,   ‘   ’ 39
Apparently we have only circumstantial evidence that Wittgenstein read

Tolstoy’s Confession.¹¹ But in addition to the a priori likelihood of his having
been led to it by his enthusiasm for The Gospel in Brief, there are the following
lines written in 1930—again from Culture and Value—in which Wittgenstein
seems to be rehearsing a very Confession-like point:
If anyone should think he has solved the problem of life and feels like telling
himself that everything is quite easy now, he can see that he is wrong just by
recalling that there was a time when this ‘solution’ had not been discovered;
but it must have been possible to live then too and the solution which has
now been discovered seems fortuitous in relation to how things were then.
And it is the same in the study of logic. If there were a ‘solution’ to the
problems of logic (philosophy) we should only need to caution ourselves that
there was a time when they had not been solved (and even at that time people
must have known how to live and think).¹²
I believe it is quite right to see here a connecting thread that reaches back to
Tolstoy’s hard-won appreciation of ‘the millions of people living and dead who
have created life, and who carry the weight of our [educated, liberated] lives
together with their own’;¹³ but also forward to Wittgenstein’s conviction that
despite the foundationalist ambitions of mainstream Western epistemology,
‘What people accept as a justification—is shewn by how they think and live.’¹⁴
I am persuaded, then, by Thompson’s suggestion that not only in the Tractatus,
but through the whole course of his philosophical development, Wittgenstein
remains heedful in one way or another of Tolstoy’s admonition to take one’s cue
from those for whom there is no such thing as the ‘problem’ of life; for whom
pseudo-questions, disengaged from the machinery of actual thought, do not arise;
or who exemplify the unselfconscious ‘integration of language and activity’.¹⁵
3 Tolstoy’s Confession
This continuity appears striking enough in itself. However, what if we were to

regard it as just a first phase in appreciating Wittgenstein’s reception of Tolstoy?
¹¹ See Thompson, ‘Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Meaning of Life’, note 10.
¹² Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 4. ¹³ A Confession, 53.
¹⁴ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd edn (1967)
(hereafter ‘PI’), §325.
¹⁵ Thompson, ‘Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Meaning of Life’, 110.
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one; it was slow, heavy, interrupted. Every few steps she looked
around her solemnly, until she reached the top of the garden, when,
as if some forgotten engagement had flashed across her mind, she
walked briskly to the outhouse, laid down her perplexing seed-
potatoes, locked the door, and tidied herself more quickly and more
carelessly than usual. Putting on her shawl and a knitted worsted
black cap or “mutch” with a crimson border (for she wore a bonnet
only on Sundays), something like a hood (it had a name, which I now
forget), she went to Mrs. Barrie to inquire if she needed anything
from the village,—that being Bell’s way of asking whether she could
get out for a short time.
“Nothing, Bell,” said Mrs. Barrie, “nothing at all that I remember of;
and I am anxious to have as little as possible in the house at
present.”
This added to Bell’s confusion and quickened her step. She made
straight for the village. I happened to be at the door at the time, and,
struck with the smartness with which she was walking, I
apprehended that there might be something wrong at the manse,
and had taken a step or two towards her. While yet about two yards
distant she asked quickly, “Hoo’s the garden doing, Mr. Martin?”
“Just middlin’, Bell; but come round and see it.”
As we went she further asked, “Have ye gotten your early taties in
yet?”
“No,” said I; “my garden is far behind this year. I have been trying to
get that house ready for the Whitsunday term. Ye’ll see that we’re
putting a better house on the Knowe Park? It’s a nice stance. The
old cottage was done, so we’re putting up a good plain house; but
the plasterers have dilly-dallied; they’re a provoking set.”
We were now in the garden. Bell’s first remark was, “This is no’ like
you, Mr. Martin; but, however, I want to ask ye a secret” (so Bell put
it). “Can you tell me if Mr. Barrie’s gotten a call, or if he’s likely to get
a call, to ony other kirk?”
“Not that I know or have heard of.”
Then she told me very circumstantially what Mr. Barrie had said, and
what Mrs. Barrie had said, and ended by asking, “What can you mak’
o’ what he said about the taties?”
I tried to explain that it was possible that many
BELL’S inisters would leave the Church of Scotland on
VIEW OF account of something the Government had done.
THE CASE.
“What!” said Bell firmly; “that cannot be—that’s no’
possible. The Government wadna daur to meddle wi’ Mr. Barrie.
There may be as gude ministers, but there’s nane better. Let them
try to put out Mr. Barrie, and they would see a bonnie stramash,—
that they would. Leave the manse! Na; thae covenantin’ times are a’
past. Just let Government try’t.”
I said that it was not at all likely that force would be required, as I
believed that if the Government persisted in doing what the ministers
thought wrong, the ministers would leave the Church quietly rather
than submit to have their rights and those of the Christian Church
interfered with.
“There’s nae Government will ever gang against gude ministers, at
ony rate against Mr. Barrie; they’re the best friends the Government
has,” said Bell. Then looking at it in her particular light, she added,
“Will ony ither body, Government or no Government, get the peas
and cabbage and taties out o’ our garden?” for Bell was an active
partner.
“I hope not,” said I, “but it’s not very unlikely.”
“If I thocht that, I would neither plant nor sow anither dreel—that I
would not; and if you’ll take the early taties I’ve cut, I’ll sell ye them.
They’re a grand kind, the auld early Dons,—grand growers, lots at
every shaw, and gude eaters,—nothing to beat them for size and
quality.”
I agreed to take Bell’s seed-potatoes, which partly pacified her; but
she came back on, “It’s no’ possible! Leave the manse—na!” until I
said that the Knowe Park garden would need to be put right at once,
that it was very good soil, that I would be happy to buy all her spare
plants and seeds, and that she should still keep the manse garden
right, as there was no saying what might happen.
Bell gave a qualified assent to this proposal: “She would see; but she
maun awa’ hame. She would need to take something up with her;”
the something was a bunch of spunks (bits of thin split wood, very
dry, about six inches long, tipped with sulphur, used for lighting
candles and lamps, unknown now that lucifer matches are so
common) and a few pounds of salt.
Mr. Barrie looked in on me shortly after Bell had left, and after a little
general talk he quietly remarked that the house—villa, he termed it—
was getting on, and that it looked a nice place. “Was I going to build
on the east side of the Knowe Park? Had I any tenant in view? What
would be the rent? Would it be ready by Whitsunday—and dry?”
His manner and precision evinced something more
than mere friendly interest, and following as they did THE
so much in the train of Bell’s visit, I concluded that he SHADOWS
would “come out” if the Government did not yield. It DEEPEN.
had been evident for some time that his sympathies
were with what was then called the “Evangelical” party, although that
name was by him considered unfair to the other side, and he
preferred calling it the protesting party; but he had taken no
prominent part in the public discussions, and was scrupulously
careful about introducing ecclesiastical politics into his pulpit
ministrations. “The good seed is the Word of God,” he would often
say; “and as ordained to minister to the souls of my parishioners, I
try to preach it faithfully, fully, and practically, avoiding controversy of
all kinds, political, ecclesiastical, theological, or dogmatic. The only
way to do real good, even in opposing error or bigotry, is to preach
the truth in love.”
April had passed; May had covered the earth with beauty, and
blossom, and promise. Never did the manse look so well, or its
surroundings more delightful, than on the evening before Mr. Barrie
left for the General Assembly in Edinburgh. I made an errand to the
manse, ostensibly to ask him to procure a certain book for me when
in town, but really to see if I could pick up an inkling of his mind on
the Church controversy, and to offer to be of any service in my
power.
Mrs. Barrie and he were sauntering in the garden. He was grave,
and as they stopped opposite some familiar flower, both seemed
sad. Bell (a most unusual thing for her) was stealthily eyeing them
from the kitchen window, having turned up the corner of the little
green-striped dimity under-screen. When she saw me, she signalled
me to meet her at the back of the manse by jerking her thumb in that
direction, and added a slight trembling motion of her clenched hand,
to express further that she wanted me to do so without Mr. and Mrs.
Barrie’s knowing it. When I reached the back court, there she was,
and she at once took speech in hand.
“Whatever’s gaun to happen, Mr. Martin? The minister
has been bundle-bundlin’ in the study for twa or three THE TOWN
days. Mrs. Barrie has been clearin’ oot auld corners, or CLERK OF
rather searchin’ into them, for there’s no’ much to clear EPHESUS.
out that’s either useless or lumbery. Is’t possible we
maun leave? It’s no’ possible. I’ve a gude mind to speak to Mr. Barrie
mysel’. Sir John was here last night, and I heard him say as he gaed
through the lobby, ‘For all our sakes, for your own sake, for your
family’s sake, for the sake of the Church of our fathers, for His sake
who wishes all His people to be one, think over the matter again
before you make a schism in His body. Carry out the good doctrine
you preached the other day when lecturing on the town clerk of
Ephesus, that we ‘ought to be quiet, and do nothing rashly.’ Mr.
Barrie only said, ‘Thank you, Sir John;’ but as he was coming ‘ben’
the lobby from seeing Sir John away, I took the liberty o’ saying, ‘Sir
John’s a clever man, a sensible man, and he’s aye been our friend.
So, sir, excuse me for saying that I hope you will’—but I got no
further; I saw the tear was in Mr. Barrie’s e’e, and that fairly upset
me.” Then she added, “Will ye no’ speak till him, Mr. Martin, seriously
and firmly? Leave the manse, and the kirk, and the garden!—I
wadna leave them if I was him, unless they sent a regiment of
dragoons.”
I said I would try. “Na,” said she, “ye maun baith try’t and do’t too.
He’s gaun to Edinburgh the morn to the Assembly, and they say he’ll
settle whether to leave the Kirk or bide in’t before he comes back
here again.”
Leaving Bell, I came to the front of the manse, and stood for a little
admiring the scene. The evening sun was about to set behind the
western hills. Nature was in her summer mantle of beauty and
verdure,—the garden smiling at my feet; the fields beyond, green,
loamy, and rich; the stream glistering and murmuring in the valley;
the distant hills lighted up with the evening glow; the clouds red,
golden, and grey, massed or straggling over the glorious sky. I felt
with Bell that to leave such a place was no easy matter, and as I had
given little attention to the Church controversy, I was at a loss what
to say. Mr. and Mrs. Barrie observed me, and came forward. After a
quiet greeting, I said, “This is a lovely scene. I find myself quoting
from Marmion, ‘Who would not fight for such a land?’”
I had given the quotation strongly; it startled Mr. Barrie. He said softly
and dreamily, as if speaking to himself, “Without were fightings,
within were fears;” then looking me steadily in the face he said, “I go
to Edinburgh to-morrow,—a most eventful journey for me and mine.
In all probability I will return disjoined from the Established Church of
Scotland, and no longer minister of the parish of Blinkbonny. Excuse
me, Mr. Martin, for feeling perplexed and anxious.”
Bell had by this time become a listener, having crept
forward very quietly. She looked at me with an BELL’S
imploring face to speak out. I tried to say something, SUMMING
but Mr. Barrie’s look was so calm and overpowering, UP.
that I could only get out “that I dared not presume to
advise in the matter; that several of his people would follow him if he
did find it his duty to come out; and that the Lord would provide.”
This was too much or rather too little for Bell, so she joined the
colloquy, addressing herself, however, to me. “Maybe He will, if
there’s a real need-be; but what sense or religion either can there be
in leaving a kirk and manse provided for us already, and where He
has countenanced us and given us peace and prosperity, for a
chance o’ anither or maybe nane at a’? I would see anither door
opened first; as Sir John said yestreen about the clerk o’ the toun o’
Ephesus, we should do nothing rashly. Think on Mrs. Barrie an’ the
bairns, and the garden and the dumb craiturs, and,” looking at the
churchyard, she added softly, “wee Nellie.”
Bell had joined the party suddenly, and the above sentence was
finished by her almost in a breath. It made Mr. Barrie wince. Mrs.
Barrie saw this, and at once left us; she got Bell to follow her, by
saying that doubtless Mr. Martin had business with Mr. Barrie. Mrs.
Barrie did her best to soothe Bell by agreeing with her: “Yes, Bell, it
will be a severe trial to leave the manse.”
“And a terrible risk, too,” said Bell. “Oh, mem, try and dinna let the
maister do’t, at least no’ as suddenly as he speaks of.”
“I leave Mr. Barrie entirely to the guidance of his own conscience in
the matter. If he goes, I go.”
“So will we a’, I fancy.”
“Well, Bell,” said Mrs. Barrie thoughtfully, “we may not be able to
keep a servant. If we are, and you are willing to go with us, you will
be an immense help to us all.”
Bell and Daisy. (Page 70).
This overwhelmed Bell. Leaving the manse was bad,
but leaving the family was terrible; such a thing had BELL’S
never entered her mind. Luckily the cow “Daisy” began PARISH.
to low impatiently, which relieved Mrs. Barrie of
present embarrassment. Bell methodically started for her milking-
pail, muttering, “The very coo’s no’ hersel’ the nicht, naether am I;
I’m behint time wi’ Daisy, and kye should be milkit regular,”—which
Bell set about with more than her ordinary vigour, all the time
speaking away to Daisy about leaving the manse, and stiffly arguing
the matter with the cow. The cow did not seem quite to understand
her; she usually did, and answered Bell with her meek eye and stolid
face; but Bell’s manner to-night was abrupt and excited, and Daisy
had probably more difficulty in comprehending the matter; so she
wagged one ear quickly, made sundry short, impatient shakes of her
head, and stared intently at Bell, but not with the usual signs of
intelligent concert. Daisy couldn’t make it out; neither, alas! could
Bell.
I did not go into the manse, although Mr. Barrie asked me. I excused
myself on the ground of his requiring all the time at his disposal to
prepare for to-morrow’s journey, but said that many along with myself
would wait anxiously for the decision he might make, and I asked
him to give me as early intimation of it as he conveniently could,
assuring him that I would be most happy to be of any service in my
power. He thanked me, and putting his arm in mine walked slowly
down the garden. As we passed between its healthy crops and trim
flower-beds, he said:
“This is Bell’s parish, and well tended it is. I’m very sorry for Bell; it
must be a severe trial to her—worthy, honest, laborious Bell!”
We halted at the little wicket gate at the bottom of the garden. There
was a sad look on Mr. Barrie’s face as he turned round and looked at
the pleasantly situated, snug manse. Memory seemed busy
unfolding her roll of bygone days. It had been the home of his happy
married life, the birthplace of his children. Then he looked at the
church: it had been the scene of his labours, the joy of his heart, the
place of his ministry to the flock he loved. Then he looked at the
churchyard: there was one little spot specially dear, but many others
hallowed in his mind by associations of the kind and good who lay
there. So absorbed was he by the reflections awakened by the
scene, that he seemed unconscious of my presence, and as his eye
travelled from object to object, he spoke sadly and to himself, “Yes,
beautiful for situation.—Thou excellest them all.—Olive plants.—
Where prayer was wont to be made.—Watch-tower.—Pleasure in
her stones.—With Christ; far better.—We shall not all sleep.” Then,
as if awaking from a dream, he said, “Excuse me, Mr. Martin; the old
Adam is too strong for young Melanchthon. Every human
consideration urges me to remain in the Church of Scotland. I would
exhaust every possible means for the sake of all concerned to avert
a disruption, but I cannot, I dare not submit to see her rights infringed
or her prerogatives violated; it would be treason to my Master. And
bitter, bitter as the alternative is, I will act as my conscience impels
me (and I have given the subject the devout consideration it
demands), and leave all, although I freely confess it is a sore trial of
my faith. I fear as I enter into the cloud. I must walk by faith, not by
sight.”
There was a nobility, a display of true valour in his
attitude, tone, and expression that awed me. The fire THE EVE
of his words kindled a flame in my heart, which grew in OF
intensity as he proceeded. When he had finished he BATTLE.
seemed as if he had been transfigured; his sadness
was gone; he looked like a knight challenging a field of foemen. I
could only grasp his hand and stumble out, “The battle is the Lord’s;
be of good courage, and let us behave ourselves valiantly for our
people and for the cities of our God, and the Lord do that which is
good in His sight.”
He returned the grasp very warmly, and said, “Exactly; that text must
be our motto. I thank you for it. But I am detaining you. I will let you
know the result whenever declared; possibly I may be your tenant at
Knowe Park.” He said this with a pleasant smile; and as we said
good-night, I added, “Knowe Park will be made as comfortable as I
can make it, although, had I expected such a tenant, I would have
made it better.”
“It’s perhaps as much as we’ll can afford,” said he cheerfully half-way
up the garden. “Good night again.”
As I walked homeward I met Sir John McLelland. I knew him as a
gentleman of the neighbourhood, and had been in the habit of
saluting him respectfully, but had rarely spoken to him; I was
therefore surprised when he said, “I called at the house, Mr. Martin,
but learning you were at the manse, I came to meet you. Have you a
spare half-hour? I wish to see you particularly.”
“I am quite at your service, Sir John.”
“Then take a quiet turn down the road;” which we did. Sir John then
began:
“Mr. Martin, I want a long talk with you about Mr.
Barrie. I know that you are very intimate with him. I SIR JOHN
need not tell you that I esteem him very highly. As a McLELLAN
minister he has few equals, that we all feel; he is, D’S
besides, a gentleman in every sense of the word—a OPINIONS.
scholar, a man of culture, quite an acquisition to the
district. Then Mrs. Barrie is a most delightful creature,—I do not
know a more thorough lady than she is; and they have a very nice
family—very nice children indeed—good-looking;—so they may well
be, considering their parents—the handsomest couple in the parish, I
may say in the county. But that is by the bye. Well, the party in the
Church of Scotland that call themselves the ‘Evangelicals,’ as if they
were the only true preachers of the gospel,—a most unwarrantable
and impertinent name for any party to assume, or rather to adopt, for
they parade it so offensively that it betrays their former orphanage,
and they strut about in the plumes they have stuck on themselves,
calling their opponents ‘Moderates,’ as if that were a term of
contempt. It would be more consistent if they’d let their moderation
be known to all men;—but that is by the bye. Well, these schismatics
and agitators—‘Evangelicals,’ if you like—have raised a hue-and-cry
about the Church in danger, and trampling on the rights of the
Christian people, and have pestered not only the church courts, but
the courts of law and the Government of the country, by their
pertinacious intermeddling with time-honoured institutions and the
rights of proprietors. And so determined and malignant are the
leaders of this movement, that they have dug out one or two
exceptional cases (you know the exception proves the rule), and
dragged them through the law courts, where they got ignominiously
beaten, because justice was administered impartially. This has
raised the ‘odium theologicum,’ the most unreasonable and
insatiable of all passions; and instead of acting as law-abiding
subjects and as peacemakers, they are determined, if Government,
forsooth, will not yield to them, to break up the Church of Scotland if
they can! The law has been clearly laid down by the judges of the
land, but they demand to be allowed to be a law to themselves.”
Here Sir John looked very indignant, then went on in a
calmer tone: “What I cannot understand is, that HEAVY
ministers above all others should object to their own HITTING.
rights being protected. The principal uproar has been
about some ministers who were appointed to parishes, but the
people would not receive them, and even the presbytery refused to
ordain them. Now, especially in the Church of Scotland, every
student before he is licensed to preach the gospel has had a
complete college education, and several years’ training in the divinity
halls, and has undergone successfully very searching examinations
conducted by eminent professors, and has, moreover, under
presbyterial superintendence gone at least creditably through trials
for licence, which included sermons on texts assigned to him. Could
anything further be desired as a safeguard against unfit men being
allowed to be ministers? It is from such that the patron, who is
generally the largest proprietor in the parish, and has therefore the
greatest interest in it, must make a selection and present a minister
to a vacant parish church, not unfrequently to the church in which he
worships. Well, these ‘Evangelicals’—ministers themselves,
remember—wish it to be in the power of the members of a church
(and you know what a mixture the membership is, of all sorts and
conditions—good and indifferent, not to say bad) to reject the
minister appointed by the patron,—a minister trained as I explained
before,—and possibly from whim, or spleen, or spite at the patron, to
object to his settlement, which can only be done by objecting to his
preaching; and to prove their case, I grieve to say, they do not
scruple at condemning his services as unedifying, or uninteresting,
or unintelligible (very likely to them), or even unsound,—set them up
for judges!—and do all in their power to blast the minister’s
prospects. Does it not strike you, Mr. Martin, as something very
strange that ministers should desire to commit themselves to such
tribunals in preference to the existing ones?”
I was at a loss what to say and how to get out of the difficulty, when
Sir John began again with great animation: “What they aim at seems
to be a sort of preaching competition, where the man who has the
knack of tickling the ears, or wheedling the affections, or flattering
the vanities of a congregation, would certainly outweigh the man of
more solid parts. The result would be that young ministers would
prepare one or two taking sermons, and thereby secure parishes;
and what ought to be a congregation of devout worshippers would
become a congregation of critics; and some fussy nobody, by dint of
sheer impertinence, would set himself—ay, even herself—up as
‘grieved at the prospect of the incalculable injury to be done to the
highest interests of the parish,’ and with a long face say ‘she felt it
her duty, her bounden duty, her painful duty,’ and stuff of that sort.
Dissenting churches have oftener split on the election of preachers
than any other thing, and bitter and disgraceful results have followed.
In such cases votes are counted, not weighed. I know of a little
insignificant ‘bodie,’—his neighbours called him ‘Little Gab,’—a
creature who was in misery through his indolence and his
intermeddling with other folk’s affairs to the neglect of his own. He
was a Dissenter, and at the meetings for choosing a minister in the
chapel he went to, he chattered and moved and objected and
protested, and was so often on his feet with his ‘Moderator, I move,’
‘Moderator, I object,’ ‘Moderator, by the forms of procedure, page,
etc.,’ that he provoked a smart word from one of their best men
every way—in education, position, and judgment. This set the bodie
fairly up, and although he richly deserved more than he got, he
spoke so glibly that he saddled the church with a minister of whom
the late Dr. Hunter, on hearing his first sermon after his ordination—
generally a man’s best—said to a friend as they came out of the
church, ‘Ye’ll get that ane to bury.’ But that is by the bye.”
As Sir John now looked to me to say something, I
LITTLE merely added, “That was like the doctor. I think I
GAB. know the church you refer to; Little Gab was a
waspish bodie.”
He at once resumed: “I am surprised that a man of good sense and
sound judgment like Mr. Barrie should be misled by the noisy
demagogues—many of them otherwise good men, but on this
subject perfect fanatics. I spoke to him on the subject the other night,
but made no impression. Have you remonstrated with him? Did he
say anything on the subject to you to-night?”
I told him what had passed at the manse. When he heard of Mr.
Barrie’s firm resolve, he said very excitedly: “It’s utter folly—it’s sheer
madness—it’s social suicide, bringing ruin on his family for a mere
phantom of excited sentimentality! Let them stay in the Church and
use constitutional means to reform abuses, if any exist. The Church
of Scotland has had an honoured past, and must have a glorious
future. They vowed to maintain and defend her; they are trying to
divide and weaken her. Can they not wait patiently until events are
ripe? Progress in a complicated body such as a church is gradual,
and should be deliberate. The leaders of this movement are
principally men who have risen to ecclesiastical eminence by their
popular gifts. Not a few of them fought bitterly against the Dissenters
in the Voluntary controversy (which, by the bye, seems shelved for
good and all; the pace was too quick to last), and now they urge their
brethren to secede if their absurd demands are not immediately
conceded. I much doubt if the noisiest now will be the first to come
out. If they do, I would not wonder to see them the first to rush back
again, and change their ‘Retract! no, not a hair’s-breadth!’ into a
breakneck stampede, in which they will crush past their deluded
followers, and whine pitifully for pardon and place. The State has
treated them well, too well, and is entitled to have its conditions
fulfilled. They want the pay and the place, but kick at the terms—
wish these all one-sided; and when the law steps in with quiet dignity
and strict justice to protect the rights of proprietors, ministers, and
people alike, and to insist on these being administered according to
express statute, the men who vowed to abide by the law either set it
at nought, or demand its subservience to their revolutionary ideas.
They wish liberty without control, privileges without conditions, and
power to exercise despotism without appeal. And because they
cannot get it,—because they should not get it,—because, having
respect to the welfare alike of Church and State, they must not get it,
they keep crying out about tyranny and treason, and ‘spiritual
independence,’ and what not.”
Sir John paused for a little, and I thought he had finished, but
something seemed to strike him, and he at it again:
“By the bye, these folks call themselves the Non-
Intrusion party. Was ever name so outrageously VIALS OF
violated? Is a proprietor an intruder on his own estate? WRATH.
Only a desperate poacher would say yes. Is a man an
intruder in his own house? None but a burglar would think so. Is a
mother an intruder in her own nursery? Only a vile and cruel nurse,
caught in the act of ill-treating the children, would have the audacity
to conceive of such a monstrous anomaly. Yet these intruding non-
intrusionists say to the State that fostered them and supports them,
and that only wishes to have its fundamental principles respected,
like the poacher, ‘Be off! you have no right here;’ like the burglar, ‘I
want this, and will have it by hook or by crook’—crook should be put
first; and like the nurse, ‘Get out of this nursery! you have no
business here. I’ll do what I like, and if you oppose me I’ll take the
children away from you.’ I may be carried away by the strong
convictions that force themselves on me as I consider the whole
proceedings, the wily, oily sophisms of these non-intrusionists; but
excuse me, Mr. Martin, for saying that they should take Judas for
their patron, and Herod the king—any of the Herods they like—for
their foster-brother.”
Sir John seemed to feel that he had gone too far, and excused
himself for being so bitter. He was a confirmed Tory, and began
about “vote-voting, everything was vote-voting now-a-days since that
Reform Bill had passed. Give some men a vote in Kirk or State, and
they became self-conceited, consequential creatures. The more they
are canvassed, the more unbearable they get. But that is by the bye.
I presume you are a Whig, Mr. Martin, so we’ll not meddle politics to-
night. Then you really think Mr. Barrie will ‘come out’?”
“I’m sure of it, Sir John. Mr. Walker of Middlemoor and he start for
Edinburgh early to-morrow morning.”
“Mr. Walker!” said Sir John; “he’s a quiet, peaceable
man; he’ll not be led away by any Will-o’-the-wisp. SIR
He’ll smoke over it, and think over it, and come back JOHN’S
parish minister of Middlemoor as heretofore. I’m glad VERDICT.
that Mr. Walker is going with Mr. Barrie; he’ll give him
the common-sense, considerate view of the question—especially the
home view, the family and fireside interest, which seems entirely
ignored. Should a secession take place, there will be a sad
awakening when too late to the meaning of these words: ‘If any
provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he
hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel,’—worse than an
infidel—worse!” Then, after a pause of a few seconds, he said, “I’m
sorry, very sorry for Mr. Barrie; if it were possible to be angry with
such a man, I feel angry—certainly at his conduct, or rather his
intentions. But I’m glad Mr. Walker goes with him. I am member of
Assembly for a royal burgh, and intend going in the day after to-
morrow; I’ll set Mr. Walker on Mr. Barrie.” Then looking at his watch,
he said, “It’s getting late; do you think it would be of any use for me
to see Mr. Barrie to-night? The fact is, I cannot rest over this matter
—it’s too—too—too dreadful altogether.”
I hinted as politely as I could that I thought nothing would shake Mr.
Barrie’s resolve. Sir John said “he feared as much, but he would see
Mr. Walker and other friends, and try to save Mr. Barrie from”—here
he hesitated, repeating, “from—from—well, I cannot get a better
word—ruin to himself and his family—certain ruin.” He shook hands
frankly with me, hoped he had not kept me too long, and promised to
let me know how matters went; and as he said good night, he looked
towards the manse and said, “I cannot get Mr. Barrie and his family
out of my head,” then started homewards.
Late as it was, I went to see the new house and garden at Knowe
Park. I had urged on the tradesmen, and it was all but finished and
drying nicely. The garden had received special attention. Except
immediately around the new house, it had not been interfered with;
and as it was stocked with good fruit-trees and bushes in the days of
the old house, these only required trimming and pruning. Bell’s cut
potatoes and spare plants were further forward than those in the
manse garden. When I got home it took a long time to tell Agnes the
events of the night. Both of us were puzzled as to whether Mr. Barrie
or Sir John was right—we rather inclined to Sir John’s notion of
patience and prudence; and whilst we admired Mr. Barrie’s noble
resolution, we, especially Agnes, spoke of “whatever was to become
of Mrs. Barrie and the dear bairns?” and did not see through it at all.
CHAPTER V.
BLINKBONNY AND THE DISRUPTION.
“But there are true hearts, which the sight

Of trouble summons forth;
Though known in days of past delight,
We knew not half their worth.”
Thos. Haynes Bayley.
S IR JOHN had written to his steward to tell me that Mr. Barrie had
left the Established Church; the steward showed me the letter; it
was a compound of amazement, sympathy, and anger.
Scarcely had he finished, when Bell, evidently in a state of great
excitement, came in and said, “Eh, Mr. Martin, it’s ower true; we’ll
hae to flit! Mr. Barrie’s gi’en up the kirk, and he has nae richt noo to
the manse. I canna tell exactly when we’ll be putten out, but the
mistress says we’ll no’ be allowed to bide lang. I wadna like to be the
Government that put Mr. Barrie out o’ house and ha’. Some
Mordecai will rise ere lang to gi’e us relief, or some Nehemiah to
speak to the king and queen about the desolation and affliction and
reproach. Them that comes to pit us out will maybe find an enemy in
the garden, like Ahab in Naboth’s vineyard. What’s the world comin’
till?”
Sir John’s steward knew Bell well, and tried to soothe her by saying,
“Don’t bother yourself. If Mr. Barrie adhered to his resolution to leave
the Established Church, no one would presume to hurry him out of
the manse; at all events, he could have it until a successor was
appointed.”
But Bell was not in a sociable mood, and only said, “Sooner or later
we maun flit.” Then handing me a letter from Mr. Barrie, she said she
would step into the kitchen until I got it read, and wait to see if there
was any answer.
The letter confirmed the steward’s news, and stated it
would be a favour if I would reserve for him the first KNOWE
offer of Knowe Park, and that he would be home as PARK.
soon as possible. After the steward had left I went to
Bell, and told her that Mr. Barrie’s letter was about Knowe Park, and
asked if she would come with me and see if it would suit. This was
rather a sudden following up of the affair, as Bell had convinced
herself that Mr. Barrie would never leave the manse; and although
she had generally ended her remarks on the subject with “Wherever
could we gang?” she had not tried to answer the question. After a
little hesitation she said, “Knowe Park! that’s where Mr. Taylor lived,
—he had a grand apple tree—an ‘Oslin pippin.’ Is’t aye yonder? It’s a
nice garden—a nice place to stop. I’ve noticed them buildin’ a new
house there, but I haena paid muckle attention till’t. I wad like to
see’t. I’ll be very glad to gang.” And off we set.
It took a very few minutes to go. Bell was pleased with the outside of
the house. “It was a nice house—fine big windows—faced the south
—wad hae a grand view—the garden was bigger than she thocht,
and in gude order. Is thae my plants?—they were thrivin’.” With such
snatches did Bell accompany her survey of the place before she
went into the house. She criticized the inside more minutely, her
standard being the manse. As she went from room to room she
spoke of each, or rather thought aloud: “This is the kitchen—it’s very
nice—lichtsome—plenty o’ room—it looks a nice grate, or I fancy
ye’ll ca’ that a range. I never tried them, but they say they’re handy.
Presses—pantry. What’s ben here?—washing-house—coal-house—
awmrie[2]—bedroom. Very nice; this will do fine. Noo, what about a
study?” I suggested a bedroom, but she gave that only a partial
approval; the other rooms pleased her. When I showed the drawing-
room, “Drawing-room!” said she; “we hae nane at the manse, and
Mrs. Barrie thinks we get on fine without it. We’ll make this the study.
But what about the outhouses?”
[2] The old Scotch name for the store-room containing dry
food, such as flour, meal, etc.
This exercised Bell greatly. There was an old building in the north
corner of the place, behind the bleaching-green, which I had left as it
was; it was a compound of stable, hay-loft, cart-shed, fruit-room, and
potato-house, but required considerable repair. I was undecided
whether to repair it or replace it by a building more in keeping with
the house, but Bell protested against new outhouses. “Na, na; nae
mair expenses. Whitewash it, gi’e it a bit sort up, and it will fit us
exactly.” Then going to the hedge on the east, she said, “Wha’s
aught this park?”
“It goes with the house,” said I, “and is at Mr. Barrie’s service.”
Bell was delighted: she saw her way to bring “Daisy” and the hens.
She became quite cheerful, and left me, saying as she parted, “It’s
the very place for us. I wadna say it’s just up to the manse, but I’m
thankfu’ to ken of such a gude hame for them among kent folk
‘Better a wee bush than nae bield,’[3] as the saying is. But it’s no’ wee
either; it’s just real nice.”
[3] Shelter.
Mr. Barrie’s return was awaited by the folks of

Blinkbonny with mingled feelings, uppermost being MR.
anxiety about his worldly prospects. They were hardly BARRIE’S
prepared for the Disruption; and when they learned RETURN.
that Mr. Barrie had disjoined himself from the Church
of Scotland, and consequently from his only source of income
hitherto, they spoke of it as a serious matter, a very serious matter. It
looked a rash step, and they felt more than they said, for the thought
of his family and their future support pressed heavily on their hearts,
and made his friends silent and solemn. He reached home on
Thursday afternoon, and felt at a loss how to act. A few of his elders
and friends had had little meetings on the subject, but these were
unsatisfactory, because every one had nearly the same want of
opinion. “They really did not know what to do;” “What could they do?”
was all they could say, followed by a shake of the head and a
puzzled look at one another. When they learned that Mr. Barrie had
got back, they debated whether to wait for him to propose a meeting,
or to go to him. The majority recommended that some of their
number should call at the manse; but each wished his neighbour to
go, and all were reluctant.
At length Mr. Taylor, a worthy elder and a sterling man, said:
“Friends, it will never do to back out that way. It’s unkind to Mr.
Barrie, and it’s not creditable to ourselves. If three or four of you will
join me,” and looking round the company, he nodded to each as he
named,—“say Mr. Smith, and Mr. Watson, and Mr. Brown, and Mr.
Martin,—we’ll go, and go soon.”
This met with universal approval, and a letter was sent to let Mr.
Barrie know that some friends would wait on him about seven
o’clock, if convenient. The reply was cordial and touching. It
conveyed his heartfelt thanks for “the prompt kindness that provided
for him so thoughtfully the earliest possible opportunity of explaining
his position, and conferring with them on the important events of the
past week,” and expressed the pleasure he would have in seeing all
that could conveniently come, whether they approved of the step he
had taken or not.
This letter removed the objection that many felt about
going to the manse, and the company filled the dining- TANFIELD
room. We expected to find Mr. Barrie dejected and HALL.
downcast, and were surprised to find him not only
cheerful, but more demonstrative in his heartiness than usual. How
to introduce the matter had puzzled the deputation. This was not
needed. Mr. Barrie very fully, but in moderate language, stated the
case as between the Free Church, the Government, and the
remaining ministers of the Established Church, making it appear very
different to me from what Sir John had made it. None of us ever saw
him so animated as when he described the meeting of the Assembly
from which, after the Protest and Declaration was made, hundreds of

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Essays on Ethics and Culture Sabina

Essays on Ethics and Culture

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

varying degrees to this or that incoming demand for a change of intellectual

view’ of those activities.³ As we’ll see, this genre of refusal—being metaphys-

³ John McDowell, Mind and World (1994), 34–6.

⁵ Ibid., §66: ‘[D]on’t think, but look!’

later-Wittgensteinian conception of normativity with some input from more

understood as a source of dialectical support for ‘traditionalism’ or ‘primitiv-

I raise no objection to the philosophy expressed in this picture, since I ﬁnd

⁹ Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970).

to Rorty, and this is understandable in the light of his unswerving commit-

1 Introduction: Recalling the 1980s

    19

It must be acknowledged that Lovibond—that is, the Lovibond of Realism

³ Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (1983) (hereafter ‘Realism’).

20    

The verdict of Glock—stated programmatically at the end of his

    21

inspired by Wittgenstein in that it appeals to Wittgenstein’s claims on par-

⁹ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 112.

22    

‘Meaning is a physiognomy’, says Wittgenstein, epigrammatically.¹² This

¹² Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E.M. Anscombe (1967), §568.

    23

3 The Idea of Truth-Aptitude

¹⁵ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 113; see in particular PI §136. ¹⁶ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 114.

24    

My book does lay stress, at least in its opening phase, on metaphysical

[t]he homogeneity of language is not [being] asserted at the phenomenal

¹⁹ Ibid., 121. ²⁰ Ibid., 119 (emphasis added).

    25

But his supporting reference to me is to some fairly preliminary thoughts on

²⁴ Realism, 63 and context. ²⁵ PI §208.

26    

³⁰ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 119 (quoted in §3). ³¹ Wittgenstein, RFM I §4.

    27

the variety of individual perspectives and responses: it approaches these with

6 Recognition-Transcendent Moral Truth?

However, when it comes to the description or ‘perspicuous representation’ of

28    

knowing how to judge the genuineness, or otherwise, of expressions of feeling:

³⁵ Wittgenstein, PI Pt II, 227. ³⁶ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 106, 100. ³⁷ Realism, 79.

    29

Now, to repeat, this is a ﬁrst attempt—though despite the diligent cross-

7 The Power to Imagine Alternatives

⁴¹ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 124–5. ⁴² Realism, 148. ⁴³ Ibid., §32.

30    

material grounding of those practices in consensus, but to avoid lapsing into

⁴⁴ John McDowell, Mind and World (1994), e.g. 34–6.

    31

scientiﬁc discourse, there is no properly philosophical reason—at any rate, no

8 Values and Secondary Qualities

32    

we talk about—the word ‘sensibilities’ being intended to embrace both phys-

⁴⁹ ‘Wittgensteinian AAR’, 125. ⁵⁰ Ibid., 126.

    33

wrong in one’s judgement correspondingly more acute. (This is what I have

9 An Enduring Critical Realism

The foregoing discussion has probably sounded a bit intransigent as a

⁵³ Ibid., 144 (emphasis added).

34    

⁵⁴ For this notion of complicity see Realism, 119.